> On the other hand, as another poster pointed out, we really don't need all that much more performance, as most of the performance of current chips isn't actua

> On the other hand, as another poster pointed out, we really don't need all that much more performance, as most of the performance of current chips isn't actually put to good use, but instead squandered The real benefit, in my view, is to emulation. It's extremely CPU intensive. And the more accurate you want the emulation, the more the resource demands go up. Today's CPUs are only just powerful enough for very good reproduction of a poorly optimized 16-bit gaming system emulator, or a greatly optimized 32-bit system emulator. But for PS2 and beyond, we don't have the power for highly accurate simulation yet. It's also nice for "wasting" power by writing in higher-level abstractions that are not as efficient, but are safer and easier to understand (think always bounds-checking a vector, instead of dropping down to raw pointer arithmetic.) Something that applies to all application development, including for emulators.