Frankly, between spending over $2000 on an HW upgrade, or $50 more on FSX, I would have gladly paid more for a flightsim that I can use on my existing decently recent HW (X2-3800+ / 2Gb RAM / 6800GT).But cost to MS makes me laugh. Nobody here has a clue of how much more this would have cost, what the real challenges would be, etc. Did ACES looked seriously into this, to the extend of spending a few man weeks to build a prototype and identify the real challenges, added cost and possibly schedule change ? We don't know.All that we know is that some claim : it is not that simple, so we left it aside - I know, except for the loading of distant sceneries which takes advantage of the second core.And we are left with mandatory HW upgrades, and wishing for a 6-10Ghz Core 2, to fly SFX as it was designed to be.But we may be pleasantly surprised when the perf. patch finally comes out - I am hopeful - until then at least :)

The number of people prepared to spend more than $2000 on upgrading their hardware just to run FS is so small that they're are not worth bothering about from a marketing point of view and are certainly not MS's target market.Of course costs matter to MS, as much as they do to any other company. No one here can know exactly what it would have cost to develop FS to use multiple threads. However, those with programming experience know it isn't a trivial matter to re-develop a substantial existing unthreaded application to use multiple threads.

it is so small and the margin so tiny (probably a few mils at best) that it's not even noticeable in MS' earning report. Like the change you have in your pocket. MS probably spends more on capucinos. Flight sim is there at 99.99% for the image value. And this image-value doesn't need much. In fact, mere perpetuation of the "cool and fun" computer stuff is enough. The TV commercial for FSX is sufficient to reach that effect, which might even be the only marketing reason why we have FSX today. This has nothing to do with strong innovation, including the theoretical problems of n-core systems, which are the elegant avenue toward the future of Moore's law. The human body is a n-core system. And it is elegant.

>The number of people prepared to spend more than $2000 on>upgrading their hardware just to run FS is so small that>they're are not worth bothering about from a marketing point>of view and are certainly not MS's target market.Unles the