One day PS3 will emulate the Wii

[Alby_da_Wolf]

Netyaroze said:

Alby_da_Wolf said:
The Cell contains ONE ~3GHz PPC core, Wii has ONE ~700MHz PPC core, XB360 has THREE ~3GHz PPC cores, so, as far as CPU matters, Wii emulation should not be impossible, while emulating the two other PPC cores using SPEs AND obtaining the power of two 3GHz ones wouldn't be easy at all. In the glorious DEC Alpha times, DEC was able to emulate a 200MHz 486 with a 500MHz Alpha (that had several times the computing power of an hypothetic 486 equally clocked), but Alpha was a general purpose CPU, while SPE is a special purpose one, so it would struggle a lot more to emulate a GP one, despite being Turing complete. It's quite unlikely that six of them could deliver the emulation of two PPC cores at roughly their same clock. So XB360 emulation, if possible, wouldn't deliver enough performance to run games smoothly, although it could be used for study and reasearch, development and mere curiosity purposes.

 

Cell one PPC Core

Wii one PPC Core

"while emulating the two other PPC cores using SPEs AND obtaining the power of two 3GHz ones wouldn't be easy at all."

 

?

 

What two other PPC Cores ? Are there any ? Are you talking about the PS3 emulating the 360 ? 

Yes, someone after the OP suggested XB360 too (*), I was pointing out the differences: qualitatively there shouldn't be any in theory, only quantitatively, but the fact that PS3's Cell has only one PPC core and XB360 three makes the difference qualitative too, as to try to get the same CPU performance would mean needing to emulate the other two XB360 PPC cores using SPEs. OTOH an emulation not working at full speed, only for study, research and development, should be possible.

 

(*) I notice now that I wasn't clear enough, I mentioned XB360, but when I wrote about the "two other PPC cores" I didn't specify I was talking about XB, and I mentioned Wii in the previous clause, it was quite ambiguous, sorry.