Over the last few days I've put a lot of time into setting up up a fairly fast system with various CPU emulators- mostly Qemu but also a couple of others- and getting compilation times etc. from them. It might interest anybody who is weighing up the attractiveness of native vs cross compilation.

http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Qemu_and_other_emulators

My major motivation was entirely practical: I wanted a Windows development system a bit more convenient than relying on removable caddies, and I needed to recycle my development ARM system and didn't have a convenient "real" replacement. Other architectures such as MIPS were incidental...