Honestly, emulation in general. Most systems can't be multi-core split well at all, as MAME demonstrates clearly.
Most of my native PC gaming won't show a huge difference between platforms-- in fact, I'm rarely CPU limited in most native games I'm playing right now on this existing rig. Therefore, about the only reason to push forward is to increase my capabilities for the future and to improve existing performance on outlying platforms like MAME.
For reference, my existing rig is an Athlon X3 (with fourth core unlocked, fully stable; the CPU reports itself as an X4 thus) overclocked at a 15% profile from the BIOS to 2.9GHz, 4GB of DDR2, a Radeon HD6850, and a dualboot of Windows 7-64 and Windows XP-32.
The only reason for the XP32 is that I'm involved in some video work where Flash Media Encoder simply won't stop dropping frames on Windows 7 but works fine on XP.
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Try checking the MAME manual at http://docs.mamedev.org
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