CPU scalability question

I'm in a market for a new CPU and having it run RPCS3 reasonably well is one of my main priorities. Unfortunately, benchmarks I've come across are scarce and the information in similar threads are often contradicting. So I wanted to ask a few questions regarding cpu specs and their effect on emulation performance:

1)I know that RPCS3 scales with cores and threads, but how much? Does it scale beyond 8 cores?
2)How useful is Hyperthreading? I.e. would 8/16 net better results than 8/8 at the same clocks?
3)Is L3 cache important? Intel i5s have 1.5MB of L3 vs 2MB on i7, does it affect performance?
4)Skylake-X supports AVX-512,does it provide any benefit?

Right now I'm choosing between 8600K and 8700, and I'm really curious which would suit me better (6/6@~5Ghz vs 6/[email protected]).

This is emulation, not brute force hacking. What I mean is that no matter how strong you PC is, if the emulator is not advanced enough, your CPU won't matter.

For your questions: An 8 core CPU is ideal for this emulator, I have experienced this myself, moving from a 4 core to an 8 core i7 6700 (4GHZ) now I get twice the speed. Full speed for the games that work.

Skylake and Kabylake are essentially the same CPU. Coffelake is also the same technology with more threads and higher frequencies. In essence you are great with any i7 8 core (Skylake, Kabylake, Coffeelake)

My opinion? Getting a cofee lake CPU TODAY, is completely worthless, because you have to buy a super expensive motherboard and the CPU's are not any faster than Sky/Kabylake (only clocked higher). The best and cheapest path that will give you almost "the same results" (remember that) would be to get something like a non K i7 6700 with a super cheap H110 mobo and you are set!

Now if you have the money to spare, sure! buy the Coffe lake i7! But that won't guarantee your RPCS3 games will work (because of what I mentioned in the 1st paragraph).

Hope it makes sense, cheers.

@"nashismo" What the heck, you're contradicting yourself here. On the one hand you say how switching from 4 core to 4core+HT cpu made the difference, yet at the same time you claim there is no point in buying Coffe lake CPUs that have more cores.

Coffe Lake is the first Intel CPU generation since about 2012 that actually is considerably faster than a previous generation so your claim about there no being a difference is completely false.

@maltie

I read somewhere they tried to run Journey using interpreter and it was fully utilizing all 16 cores of some Ryzen 7 CPU (resulting in about 1 fps) so I guess anything up to 16 does make sense. On the other hand When I was trying to run Ni no Kuni it was only able to utilize 50% of my Ryzen 5 1600 so again, it all depends on the game. Considering that even a PS2 emulator can use up to 3 cores even though PS2 had a single core CPU and that PS3 had 8 core CPU I think we can expect a very good multi core support from RPCS3. I wouldn't buy anything slower (multi core score) than i5-8400.

I don;t see any reason why PCS3 would struggle to use hyperthreading.

@"nashismo"  What the heck, you're contradicting yourself here. On the one hand you say how switching from 4 core to 4core+HT cpu made the difference, yet at the same time you claim there is no point in buying Coffe lake CPUs that have more cores.

Coffe Lake is the first Intel CPU generation since about 2012 that actually is considerably faster than a previous generation so your claim about there no being a difference is completely false.

@maltie

I read somewhere they tried to run Journey using interpreter and it was fully utilizing all 16 cores of some Ryzen 7 CPU (resulting in about 1 fps) so I guess anything up to 16 does make sense. On the other hand When I was trying to run Ni no Kuni it was only able to utilize 50% of my Ryzen 5 1600 so again, it all depends on the game. Considering that even a PS2 emulator can use up to 3 cores even though PS2 had a single core CPU and that PS3 had 8 core CPU I think we can expect a very good multi core support from RPCS3. I wouldn't buy anything slower (multi core score) than i5-8400.

I don;t see any reason why PCS3 would struggle to use hyperthreading.

No, the Coffee Lakes are same architecture, they are only clocked higher and they have more cores, THAT is why they are faster. It is obvious why.

I said it made no sense, in reference to how much money you would be spending and that having something faster than Kabylake won't make MUCH of a difference on an emulator that is still been worked on.

An emulator that is complete, or refined enough, like Dolphin per instance, runs great on even low end hardware.

I did not contradict myself on what I was trying to say.