(07-11-2014, 07:37 AM)Oemenia Wrote: Sorry to derail the discussion a bit but why is that architecture improvements show up so much for emulation?
I'm not a dolphin developer, so I am not entirely sure, but;
Dolphin stresses the CPU a lot, it also seems to use many different ISA extensions that most other programs aren't fit to use quite yet (AVX, AVX2, SSE4+, FMA3/4, etc.)
While the clear differences in performance potential between Sandy Bridge and Haswell (Ivy Bridge isnt an entirely new architecture on it's own.), such as the remodeled execution units, added simple ALU, added LSUs, larger queues, etc. help immensely in performance alone, the addition of AVX2 which allows integer SIMD operations (very common. Especially in past SIMD usage such as with SSE) make the difference even larger.
Remember, AVX has literally twice the SIMD potential of SSE, while being completely compatible with SSE. So a CPU capable of using the AVX2 ISA extension can perform tons of different 256-bit SIMD operations, including integer ones. AVX1 is 256-bits wide as well, but mostly deals with floating point numbers (far less common), and of course, SSE as a whole can only address 128-bits, so it's potential is half that of any variant of AVX.
Sandy Bridge is AVX compliant, but NOT AVX2 compliant.
Haswell is AVX2 compliant.
If you were to ask more specific questions, I may be able to help a bit more, sorry for the vagueness.