[scarybeast]

I like the framing here, that of seeing this as a showcase of modern superscalar improvements. And yes, it's about single core performance only.

What is particularly interesting to me is how thoroughly superscalar "wins". Because of complexities with 6502 -> x64 mapping, and handling self-modifying code in particular, some of the most common 6502 instructions explode to multiple x64 instructions. Despite that huge extra instruction load, the translation still manages to run at much greater speed than a 1:1 instruction ratio.

Modern processors do not run on electrons. They run on unicorn tears and magic.

[saagarjha]

Note that there is also a speedup from dynamic optimization.