Quote:
Originally Posted by erco
The last time I was at FlightSafety for recurrent training, I spent some time with the sim techs, asking questions and looking at the hardware. I was surprised to learn that today's multi-core desktops have more than enough computing and graphics power to run a Level D full motion simulator. What the desktop can't do is properly synchronize everything so that everything that's supposed to happen NOW happens NOW. Thus you need a multi-board/multi-processor thing that lives in a server rack. But, relatively speaking, powerful it ain't.
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Well, "powerful it ain't" may be true at the single board/processor level but combined into that multi-board multi-processor supercomputer it is a fair bit more powerful than the new i7 multicore PC about to arrive on my doorstep. But it's true that things have moved enormously over the 20+ years I spent in the flight simulation business. The Visual computers for a certain VSTOL aircraft back in 1987 occupied a portacabin-like structure about 30 feet by 30 feet, completely full up, unique PC boards about 2 feet square and generating enough heat to warm a factory. All to enable low level graphics rendering at high speed. It was later replaced by a system in a cabinet about the size of a small single wardrobe. The later ones were about half that size and some are now down to super PC/rack size.
We've come a long way and we haven't finished yet.