> Makes you wonder how fast MAME will become when it will truly support parallelism. > Right now dual cores have similar if not better performances than quad cores.
Not true - on games like NFL Blitz, MAME will improve up to 3 cores (although it won't soak 'em all), and it won't get worse above that as it used to.
> The old MAME dogma "we will have 100GHz CPU someday so don't worry about speed" has > been contradicted by reality. CPUs seem to have reached their physical limit around > 5GHz. Now the only way to get better performance is parallelism. So MAME will need to > add real support for it sooner or later.
It's physically impossible to parallelize things that didn't happen in parallel on the real hardware, which for non-3D games is "almost everything". Not to mention that you'd lose more performance than you gained trying to synch - doing IPC across cores is still extremely slow on x86/x64. If CPUs don't get faster (engineering samples of Intel's upcoming "Sandy Bridge" core can run happily at 5 GHz on normal air cooling, so the death of Moore's Law has been exaggerated a bit) then emulation of some games will simply not be possible.
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