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boodroe:
I have read that mame runs mostly off of the CPU and not the graphics card. Would it be worth buying a dual processor motherboard to run the high end games in mame? Will having a dual processor motherboard make mame twice as fast?
Jdurg:

--- Quote from: boodroe on June 02, 2008, 02:57:49 pm ---I have read that mame runs mostly off of the CPU and not the graphics card. Would it be worth buying a dual processor motherboard to run the high end games in mame? Will having a dual processor motherboard make mame twice as fast?

--- End quote ---

Absolutely not.  In fact, it may make MAME run even slower since now it would have to synch up to two completely separate processors through the motherboard.  Dual Core processors are able to function well because the two CPU cores are contained within the same physical chip and there isn't as much 'talking' needed with them.  In addition, they are very powerful processors on their own.

Remember, just because you have multiple processors doesn't mean that you have twice as much CPU power.  In order to take advantage of both processors, you need to have software designed to use them both.  This software will send certain commands to one processor and other commands to the other processor.  All the while, the system has to synch up what the two CPUs are doing to ensure the taks gets completed properly.

With emulation, you really can't separate one emulation task into multiple "threads" and gain any speed at all.  In some cases, you lose speed as you try and synch things up.  Therefore, throwing in multiple processors won't do anything as the steps which slow down emulation are only able to be done by one CPU at a time. 

A good analogy is putting multiple engines in a car.  You can throw four engines in an automobile, but it doesn't really mean that the car will go faster than an automobile with only one engine.
Arshad:
Hmm, I'm not entirely convinced that this is true (that sync'ing would offset any possible gains from multi-threading).  I would imagine that at the very least some of the processing happens on co-processors, whether it's for sound or video or whatever and this could be spawned off as separate threads.  I haven't looked at the MAME code, so I could be completely wrong, but I could also imagine a scenario where one processor is doing the ISA decode and generating and caching 'optimal' sequences of native code that the other CPU could then execute (although this could all be done offline, or as a preprocess too).  Maybe not a huge benefit, but given that all CPU's are going multi-core, it's dumb to ignore cycles that are sitting idle.  Thread synchronization is obviously an issue, but with an intelligent design it could be minimized.

Anyways, I guess the bottom line for today's implementation is that a higher clocked single-core CPU is going to outperform a lower clocked one with multiple cores.
billpa:
You should check out this thread if you are interested in running some of the more demanding games

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=72776.0

What it comes down to is what games you want to play and whether they are worth spending the money for a 2 core duo system. There are probably only a handful of games that I wish I could play (Gauntlet Legends, Blitz, Wayne Gretzkey's Hockey) but the additional cost of building a system to run them is too much for me right now.
Timstuff:
You only need a dual core processor if you intend to run more graphics intesive emulators like NullDC (which can be nice to have since Dreamcast was home to many arcade-perfect ports of recent games), or new games like Street Fighter 4. In my experience though, an AMD single-core processor gets the job done just fine when it comes to Mame.
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