Dolphin on Alder Lake

[finalfantasy6464]

Hello All,

(Apologies if this has already been brought up, if it has been please direct me to any currently existing discussion, I had a quick search but couldn't see anything)

As I'm in the process of upgrading my computer, I wondered if there was any interest in the community about how Alder lake will work with Dolphin? I imagine that the P-Cores exclusively will be used but did wonder whether the E-Cores and P-Cores could be used in tandem, in some way... Though I imagine the work that would be involved wouldn't be worth it unless mass amount of people adopted the technology.

I suppose it might be another case similar to Quad Core support where the benefit might exist but the amount of work required to get that benefit just isn't worth it.

Would be interested to hear of anyone else's thoughts on the matter, because it's interesting to me!

Cheers,

Joey

[themaster123]

I doubt it would matter much. There might be a thing where dolphinwill use e cores instead of the p core hurting performance . If that happens there might need to be program or os updates to fix it. As for using both core together I don't see it happening as dolphin would likely be use more core already if they could, but emulation is already hard to run in parallel from what understand. In the faqs on the site already go though why they don't use more cores which you can look it up if you want.

[finalfantasy6464]

(11-16-2021, 07:13 AM)themaster123 Wrote: I doubt it would matter much. There might be a thing where dolphinwill use e cores instead of the p core hurting performance . If that happens there might need to be program or os updates to fix it. As for using both core together I don't see it happening as dolphin would likely be use more core already if they could, but emulation is already hard to run in parallel from what understand. In the faqs on the site already go though why they don't use more cores which you can look it up if you want.

Oh, I doubt it as well like I say because the benefit/work ratio just doesn't make sense. The E-Core/P-Core thing was mostly what I was thinking, I don't mind only using the P-Core but only the E might stifle performance a little bit. Outside of that I imagine it'll be relatively the same compared to a 10th gen or 11th gen or comparative AMD part... There is a ceiling at some point where other inefficiencies bottleneck you no matter what you do. 

[mbc07]

Keep in mind the E-Cores delivers about the same performance of a 7th gen Intel CPU and are also clocked reasonably high (3+ GHz). In other words, even if Dolphin threads ends landing exclusively on E-Cores, they still should provide enough performance to run anything you can throw at Dolphin at fullspeed...

[finalfantasy6464]

(11-16-2021, 07:12 PM)mbc07 Wrote: Keep in mind the E-Cores delivers about the same performance of a 7th gen Intel CPU and are also clocked reasonably high (3+ GHz). In other words, even if Dolphin threads ends landing exclusively on E-Cores, they still should provide enough performance to run anything you can throw at Dolphin at fullspeed...

It's possible that it's just the games I choose to play (or the way I choose to play them!) but even on 10th gen in the past on another computer I've used I've had hitches/slowdown spikes occasionally. 
I'm one of those weirdos though who prefers 45fps completely locked to 60fps with even 1 hitch because those hitches don't happen on console.

I didn't know that about the E-Cores though, I always thought Dolphin was extremely heavy on the CPU but again, might just be my bias because I've never really had a flawless emulation experience using it. 

[MayImilae]

Quote:they still should provide enough performance to run anything you can throw at Dolphin at fullspeed...

That will still probably struggle with some of the more demanding titles, like MMU games, the last story, metroid prime 3, etc. 3ghz is pretty weak, we're just so used to crazy 5+ghz Intel CPUs that it's easy to forget how demanding Dolphin can be. This is especially important as the dual core hack slowly sails off into the distance.

If anyone gets an alder lake CPU I'd be very interested in them running a few games on the E cores and seeing the results. Personally I'm still intending to go AMD with my eventual upgrade, so I won't be able to get those results myself.