I have a 2600k at 4.5 GHz (probably can go faster, since I haven't put much effort into overclocking). For almost everything I do, it's fine, but some games in Dolphin still push the limits. It's really annoying when something runs perfectly well most of of the time, but has occasional slight speed drops.

25% faster clock-for-clock would probably fix this in most of the games I care about, and that might be enough to get me to upgrade.

I know that. But I also know FMA is what you're almost always doing with a FPU, in terms of consumed clock cycles.

So I don't really think it's that misleading. It's the go-to instruction.

> Also, it is unlikely that you are actually memory bandwidth bound unless you are looping through linear memory on every core.

Well, that's what Intel vtune says. If I'm processing stuff at total bandwidth of 30 GB/s, I tend to believe it. Each core is dual issue, so with SSE you can process up to 32 bytes per cycle per core. When you have 4 cores at 3.5 GHz, that adds up. The CPU beast can consume an order of magnitude more data than DRAM can supply, even with just SSE. So you can do a lot of operations on the data and still be memory bound.