fade2black, Haswell is around 20% faster in Dolphin compared to Ivy Bridge, and around 25+% better than Sandy Bridge. See the Wind Waker CPU Benchmark thread for real world results. Other programs, specifically those used in benchmarks on a lot of websites, don't even come close to doing the same type of workload Dolphin does (like dynamically recompiling code) so they don't show a massive leap in performance. It just happens that the changes Intel made in Haswell really benefited the types of calculations that Dolphin does, but the same can't be said for programs like 7zip or Handbrake.
An i5-4670K is king for price, performance, and power efficiency, in regards to Dolphin at least. It may not be worth the upgrade for you at all, unless you're a very wealthy enthusiast. Even I wouldn't consider upgrading, not for another two generations at least. That doesn't really help you with running games like LoZ:TP at fullspeed though.
About the issue of accuracy versus speed, this reminds me a lot of bsnes a few years ago. There are actually a number of things the developers can do to speed up Dolphin without sacrificing accuracy. Optimizations can be made, it's just that they're not really low-hanging fruit so-to-speak. Personally, I would not worry about it. I'm confident that Dolphin won't ever reach a drastically unplayable state (at least one that isn't optional, a la Software Renderer). If the Zelda ucode ever gets rewritten for HLE audio, that would greatly help with TP, SMG1, and SMG2, which are some pretty demanding games with LLE audio.
An i5-4670K is king for price, performance, and power efficiency, in regards to Dolphin at least. It may not be worth the upgrade for you at all, unless you're a very wealthy enthusiast. Even I wouldn't consider upgrading, not for another two generations at least. That doesn't really help you with running games like LoZ:TP at fullspeed though.
About the issue of accuracy versus speed, this reminds me a lot of bsnes a few years ago. There are actually a number of things the developers can do to speed up Dolphin without sacrificing accuracy. Optimizations can be made, it's just that they're not really low-hanging fruit so-to-speak. Personally, I would not worry about it. I'm confident that Dolphin won't ever reach a drastically unplayable state (at least one that isn't optional, a la Software Renderer). If the Zelda ucode ever gets rewritten for HLE audio, that would greatly help with TP, SMG1, and SMG2, which are some pretty demanding games with LLE audio.