In this video I explain why PS3 emulation is so fast, and I definitely don't spend half of the video gushing over x86 instructions.
I sort of made this video as a response to all the videos with a title along the lines of "why is the PS3 hard to emulate" without actually going into any technical details beyond "the PS3 is complex".
Additional reading:
RPCS3 blog: https://rpcs3.net/blog/
My blog on AVX-512 and RPCS3: https://whatcookie.github.io/posts/why-is-avx-512-useful-for-rpcs3/
RPCS3 youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@RPCS3_emu
FOSDEM video on RPCS3 internals by AlexAltea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4joCMfTPP4M
PS3 hardware overview https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/playstation-3/
Chapters
0:00 Intro
2:05 SPU introduction
2:20 SPU Xfloat
4:34 Ninja Gaiden Comparisons
5:27 Specific SPU FP instructions
8:46 SHUFB
11:14 SHUFB performance discussion
12:30 VGF2P8AFFINEQB path
16:14 VPERM2B
17:35 ISA and performance
19:17 Loads and stores
20:49 Sleepy Nier
21:48 Conclusion