Squilliam said:
zarx said:
the problem with that is the different CPU architecture, it is easy to virtualize a PC OS in another PC OS because the hardware is the same. WINE is not an emulator it is an abstraction layer it just emulates software not the hardware. The X360 uses a 3 core IBM RISC chip were as PC's use 86X based CISC CPUs the easy of porting from PC to x360 is more to do with the dev tools that microsoft provide as they are very much the same as PC tools (DirectX, debugers etc). The PS3 uses a Cell processor that has 1 RISC core of the same type as the 360 cores and 7 "synergistic processing elements" that are not full CPU cores they are closer to co-processors (or GPU stream processors) while the Cell does have a lot more compute power but that is more to do with parallelization than raw speed which is important in emulation.
as a rule to emulate a CPU properly you need a CPU ~10x faster than the one you are emulating, it is different when emulating a modern GPU. that is why a Wii emulator wouldn't work as the Wii CPU is reportedly clocked at 729 Mhz while the Cell is clocked at reportedly clocked at 3.2Ghz only ~4x faster the Cells parallel power doesn't really help. the PS2 has a 299Mhz CPU but has 2 co-processors the Cell would be better suited to emulating.
|
Actually it would be fairly straight forward for the PS3 to emulate the Wii. The biggest problem is gaining access to the Move libraries and porting them for use with the Wiimote. The PPC core in the PS3 is just an evolved version of the PPC core in the Wii so it would not be difficult for it to run the same programs as they would share most if not all of the same instructions. Infact it would probably be easier to emulate the Wii than the PS2 because the PS2 has a very unique architecture and the PS3 cannot match it for memory bandwidth which makes emulation more difficult.
|
While it is true they are both derived from the same line of CPUs both are heavily modified so they are probably not similar enough for the Cell to act as a Wii CPU at least not without low level programming (not something your average homebrew developer would be able to do without a dev kit at least) and the ability to downclock the PPC to 729Mhz. Running faster any games that require specific timings from the CPU wouldn't run properly if at all (more it has been optimised for the hardware more likely this is) and running faster would break most games anyway, aditionaly the speed and amount of cache etc would also cause problems if not managed correctly. The Wii has other quirks like the the memory architecture and the way the Wii's GPU works would mean that it would still be nearly impossible to get an emulator compatible with a handful of games on the PS3.
@TheVoxelman on twitter
