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Is Mame still using 2 cores only? (aka should I get a core 2 duo or quad?)
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Lilwolf:
One more mention on the quad core.  Windows can use the 3rd.  Lots of little background stuff goes on.  So pushing those onto another also helps... a bit...
jezz:

--- Quote from: Lilwolf on October 28, 2012, 08:43:55 pm ---One more mention on the quad core.  Windows can use the 3rd.  Lots of little background stuff goes on.  So pushing those onto another also helps... a bit...

--- End quote ---

To be clear, Windows doesn't exactly schedule as you're describing. You could explicitly set the CPU affinity of every process to get that behavior, but that's more effort than it's worth. Windows 7-and-prior will schedule arbitrarily, doing some tolerable-but-not-really-optimal load balancing between the available cores. In general, other processes will share the cores MAME is running on such, though just to a lesser extent than on a >2 core machine (unless MAME completely pegs them, which isn't common).

Windows 8 has some different behavior in this department that I'm not clear on, but I seem to recall the SMP scheduler has been rewritten (though this may have just been to support 256 cores up from 64 cores).
kahlid74:

--- Quote from: jezz on October 28, 2012, 09:53:52 pm ---
--- Quote from: Lilwolf on October 28, 2012, 08:43:55 pm ---One more mention on the quad core.  Windows can use the 3rd.  Lots of little background stuff goes on.  So pushing those onto another also helps... a bit...

--- End quote ---

To be clear, Windows doesn't exactly schedule as you're describing. You could explicitly set the CPU affinity of every process to get that behavior, but that's more effort than it's worth. Windows 7-and-prior will schedule arbitrarily, doing some tolerable-but-not-really-optimal load balancing between the available cores. In general, other processes will share the cores MAME is running on such, though just to a lesser extent than on a >2 core machine (unless MAME completely pegs them, which isn't common).

Windows 8 has some different behavior in this department that I'm not clear on, but I seem to recall the SMP scheduler has been rewritten (though this may have just been to support 256 cores up from 64 cores).

--- End quote ---

Windows 8 SMP was re-written to better facilitate how cores and threads are handled with regard to virtualization.  Specifically since Windows 8 core is essentially Server 2012 which has Hyper-V as it's main fighting point against VMware's vSphere.
bizkonson:

--- Quote from: xefned on October 23, 2012, 08:05:51 pm ---
Still 2 core as far as I know.
But the non-mame games would still benefit from quad core, so if playing them is a priority as high as mame, you should consider quad-core.  The Phenom's and Zambezi's are quite affordable for how much power they pack.

--- End quote ---

when you say non mame games will benifit do you mean regular PC games or the other emulators like DC emu or PS2 emu?
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