I'd imagine weird timing and chemical interactions being used by the brain as it is an adaptable system and might be able adapt to use them if they turn out to be helpful.

Human designers have every reason to work very hard to make sure they understand their own designs and that they are free from weird issues. Chips aren't designed [by humans] to have strange EM interactions, but sometimes they do anyway and that occasionally gets exploited---not often though. On the other hand, evolution has no such motive, so I imagine that weird edge cases are vastly more important in biological brains. It seems quite possible that whereas only a few NES games are rendered unplayable on emulations with less fidelity, humans brains just won't work at all until we represent most of what happens on a lower level.

However, I hope that's not the case, since if it is, we have that much longer to wait for whole-brain emulation. I also suspect we will still have heuristics that perform adequately at speeds many orders-of-magnitude faster than molecular simulations (and that quantum effects are negligible).

Also please ignore the 3Ghz vs 25Mhz comparison, it perpetuates the myth that computational power is about clock speed and not operations per second and memory bandwidth.

If we were comparing clock speeds, I would be more interested in the 3GHz to 1.79MHz (the actual NES processor, rather than the first emulation) comparison.