Hardware Is the New 3ds CPU 3x or 6x more powerful than the OG 3ds's CPU?

[XRTerra]

For those of you who don't know, the "Old" 3ds' CPU was a Arm11 dual core cpu clocked at 268mhz. The "New" 3ds' cpu was also an Arm11 cpu, but it was a quad core cpu clocked at 804mhz.

804 ÷ 268 is exactly 3, probably to keep the cpu and gpu synced as both the CPU and GPU in the OG 3ds were 268 mhz.

2x the cores mean 2x the amount of processing, so that's 3(as much clock speed) x 2(twice as many cores) to get 6(times the performance of the old 3ds' cpu).

According to Nintendo's official ad for the n3ds(new is better) the n3ds can load ssb4 in 18 seconds. o3ds can load ssb4 in 43, 43÷18 is 2.3 meaning the n3ds cpu can load data at LEAST 2.3x faster which is fine because loading data is different than processing code. According to Sony the PS5 has about 9 Zen 2 cores worth of performance in the motherboard itself just to load games/manage the ssd while the actual CPU processes the game which can lead to big performance boosts in games that need to load in a lot of textures/models/etc which will definitely come into play later this gen.

Am I right or nah?

 

[GammaPhonic]

The relationship between number of cores/clock speed and processing power is not linear.

 

[XRTerra]

The relationship between number of cores/clock speed and processing power is not linear.

Then is there a consistent increase across games/emulation or does it just depend on how fast the cpu can get data from the sd card/cartridge?

The old 3ds barely manages 5-10 frames in ps1 and n64 emulation, meanwhile the new 3ds can blow through it. Though ps1 and n64 emulation on 3ds isn't as mature as Genesis or SNES emulation yet, seeing as the official VC games run really slowly on the old 3ds(or an underclocked new 3ds to old 3ds clocks) but snes9x runs most games at 60 fps underclocked, albeit with slight audio issues. Genesis emulation just runs flawlessly on old 3DS(or at least the games I tested on an underclocked n3ds) with no audio issues(though if there were any, it's hard to tell as snes audio is higher quality than genesis audio).

 

[zoogie]

It's anywhere from 3x to 6x faster. For a single threaded algorithm, new3ds cpu is 3x as fast.
For a multi-threaded algorithm, it can be up to 6x as fast.

Now things can get more complicated when you consider how the 3ds OS manages userland processes.
For old3ds, user threads get the full speed of one core and up to ~80% of the system core.
For new3ds, user threads get full speed in two cores, and ~80% of the system core.
The % of systemcore cpu is also regulated by the exheader, but it can't be more than 89% (and it's usually quite a bit lower).

There's also an additional L2 cache in the new3ds, and I have no way to quantify that without testing (it won't be a huge difference).

 

[ghjfdtg]

The cores alone won't give you 3x (or more) performance. You also need the L2 cache because the system is memory bandwidth limited at this point. Old 3DS is probably at the memory bandwidth limit as well going by how enabling only L2 cache on New 3DS without the extra cores or higher clock can fix frame drop issues in a few games.

And the enormous loading time difference for Super Smash Bros. is Nintendo not telling the whole story. This game requires so much memory the firmware is forced to reboot to free up memory on Old 3DS which increases boot time a lot. Otherwise CPU speed barely affects loading times because the slow SD card reading is the bottleneck.