I have a masters in Mechanical Engineering, and have been using flight simulators and building computers since 1987 (I was a junior in college at the time). I’m sorry I used language that annoyed you. Technically, however, cores are cpus and you know it. Just because they live on a single chip doesn’t make them any less of a central processing unit. Oh, look, if I look at the perfomance of my cores in task manager, it calls each of them CPU0 - CPU7… huh. interesting.
I’m not sure what topics you’re talking about that you’ve studied? Aerodynamics? Multi-threading? Massive Graphics processing? I asked about your flight simulation programming credentials. Have you done actual programming for a production code?
I was around listening to the developers discuss the development of FSX and the first attempts at multi-threading it. Basically, they got it to process on two cores of four available at the time. That was the best that they could split up the various threads. Granted, technology has improved a lot since 2009, but, MSFS is technically really only FSX with a new graphics engine and a couple other new technologies. Be that as it may, you’re right, I don’t know much, and it’s all second hand knowledge. Yes it’s got a vastly improved aerodynamic engine, but, as I understand it, it’s basically the same engine, but able splits the airplane up into several thousand surfaces instead I believe it was 6 in FSX. I forget.
Also, yes, audio could be processed on another core, but, then again, it’s probably not going to tax that core a lot, given what’s going on in the other cores, you probably won’t even see it. The aerodynamic equations, however, are likely to melt a core, and from what I understand, can’t be multi-threaded because it’s a serial calculation, so there’s no point. What about moving graphics data, can that be multi-threaded?
Where I do have experience is in FEA, and you do need to leave at least a core free for other processes (or programs as many people call them), or you’ll actually get slower processing times. And that’s if that’s the only thing you’re doing is running the computer to solve a complex problem.
But, yes, you’re right, I’ll say it again, I am definitely not an expert in this.