CPUs

[vesicular]

This winter I'm going to be doing a massive update to my arcade cabinet, which next month turns 10 years old (crazy when I think about it). I worked a bit this weekend on parting out some of the hardware, and tonight I worked on CPU's for the new rig I'm going to build

Comments

[vesicular]

The actual electricity cost difference is pretty minimal. The lower power consumption is for laptops/mobile. And the weird thing is that Haswell at full load actually takes more power than IB, it's just that IB idles far higher. Since most people use their computers to surf the web and are idle a lot of the time, you get lower aggregate power consumption.

This is why the IB chips are still expensive. They're better for desktops because you can overclock them higher. Haswell also throttles at a lower temp. IB will happily sit at 90c but Haswell if it hits that temp will throttle a few hundred Mhz to save power.

[vesicular]

Has nothing to do with the system emulated and everything to do with how emulation works. Very little can be passed off to multiple cores, because you're building a timing system, things have to happen in certain order so that the emulation is accurate. Mame has started to move certain things into a 2nd core, but it's mainly video and things that do not actually affect the emulation of the hardware. This is why very fast single core speeds are what is best for emulators.

[vesicular]

But yes, all emus are CPU bound, not GPU bound. The fastest GPU for my arcade monitor has an ATI chipset in it from 2006. It runs Street Fighter IV at 60fps. But you need a modern CPU OC'd to make that happen cuz all the major processing goes through that, not the GPU.