> multithreading and SIMD capability disabled

[EDIT: it looks like I may have misinterpreted the article; see replies]

To clarify, I believe they ran the benchmarks with SSE disabled. SSE is more than just SIMD; these days SSE is used for most (all?) floating-point calculations, even non-SIMD. If you disable SSE, you force floating-point ops to use the old x87 FPU, which has been discouraged by the CPU manufacturers for over 10 years.

In other words, disabling SSE is significantly crippling all floating-point performance.

http://www.realworldtech.com/physx87/4/

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3206101/extended-80-bit-d...

(nothing against asm.js, which I think is very cool)