[dietrichepp]

It’s hard to compare memory bandwidth of these systems because of the various differences (e.g. different RAM types). I know that the theoretical RAM bandwidth for the N64 is way higher than what you can practically achieve under typical conditions.

[chaboud]

I totally agree, except when it comes to emulation. It is immensely hard to real-time emulate if some facet of your host hardware isn’t at least a little bit faster than the corresponding element in the emulated system. Then you have to lift the abstraction and often find that the rest of the system reflects this specificity.

At my last job, we had ASICs that allowed for single-sample audio latency with basic mixing/accumulation functions for pulling channels of audio off of a bus. It would have been tragically expensive to reproduce that in software, and the required hardware to support a pure software version of that would have been ridiculous.

We ended up launching a new platform with a different underlying architecture that made very different choices.