this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2026
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The RK3326's CPU in it is around 100x faster than the GBA SOC, as well as 64 bit and has 4 cores - so at their respective peaks can be around 1000x faster than a game boy.
The R36S has 1GB of ram, or around 4000x what the GBA had.
So long story short you're minimum 100x overkill for playing gameboy games (assuming an insane 10x overhead)
Surely it doesn't actually run the CPU that fast when emulating GBA games? Speeding up the CPU meant actually speeding up the game as well. Emulators, especially for these older consoles, try very hard to get as close to real hardware as possible.
that's nuts.
do u have some kind of source for the cpu being that much faster?
Just did a google search, here's the GBA and here's the RK3326 (which is the SOC in that handheld).
are you referring to the mhz and ghz?
cus that isn't really entirely reflective of performance.
when the difference is that huge, it obviously says something, but there's 20 year old CPUs that have a higher cpu clock rate than modern CPUs but easily get destroyed by the modern CPUs in benchmarks
Well yeah, I can't say I pulled out my hardware for a benchmark - but I think its a reasonable indicator of a minimum bounds when comparing older hardware with low clocks to newer. ie presumably the GBA doesn't have AVX, but if you're running gameboy games thats just wasted silicon.
Between the GBA to the RK3326 there's almost 2 decades of improvement, honestly 'only' 1000-4000x improvement is actually kinda disappointing considering the previous decades following Moores law.
well, then again the r36s costs like 30 bucks and the gba cost like 180 dollars adjusted for inflation
But just imagine how much the r36s would be worth in 2001.
that being said that's mostly because of different markets though, it'd be better to compare the switch to the GBA (Nintendo wants maximum money) vs the Chinese government trying to home grow a chip fab (government subsidiaries and a desperate need for good PR)