I can confirm this. At work I helped create a PowerPC interpreter running on x86-64 that was faster than anything else I could find. In many cases, it was fast

I can confirm this. At work I helped create a PowerPC interpreter running on x86-64 that was faster than anything else I could find. In many cases, it was faster than actual PowerPC hardware. Our first two attempts at a JIT couldn't beat the interpreter. Eventually we did it. We had to, since the PowerPC system being emulated had real-time software running on a beast of a CPU. It was quad-core, 1.5 GHz, out-of-order, with multiple pipelines. For reasons, all 4 cores needed to be emulated on a single host core.