> > If I may ask you, do you think the fact that Windows 7 is handling parallelism > > (multiple cores) better is a factoring much in the performance. Maybe the answer is > > somewhere in JohnIV benchmarks but then I missed it. > > The speedup is primarily because x64 has twice as many CPU registers as 32-bit and > compilers can generate substantially better code in that situation. It's not related > to the properties of any specific operating system since MAME sees a similar speedup > ratio on all OSes.
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.
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.