Is Mame still using 2 cores only? (aka should I get a core 2 duo or quad?)

[Endprodukt]

This maybe beaten to death but I wanted to be sure what's going on right now. I want a faster processor so I can play some more 3D games like Tekken Tag or Soul Calibur. It's either a Q9650 or an E8600 depending on what I really need as the price difference is quiet huge. Any input would be appreciated. Thanks!

[xefned]

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.

[Endprodukt]

My mainboard wont support those... needs to be intel quad or core 2 duo unfortunately. Right now I have Q6600 with 2,4ghz which is not enough for some of the game i'd love to play. 

[xefned]

Oh yeah, a new motherboard increases the investment substantially. But processor upgrades for LGA 775 boards are quickly reaching end-of-life. I personally wouldn't put any more money into that board.

[Endprodukt]

maybe I'll wait until the processors for the socket will be sold for next to nothing. thanks mate!

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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]

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...

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]

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...

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).

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]

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.

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