Rumour: PS4 to feature AMD GPU a gen ahead of nextbox

[Pemalite]

walsufnir said:

Viper1 said:

Skeeuk said:

IT WOULD HAVE TO HAVE BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY

fail move otherwise, if chipset is completly different could they not emulate?

Emulating PowerPC with an X86 chip is nasty.

eh... no :) look at dolphin-emu or apple's rosetta. *but* emulating the ps3 is absolutely no option - ppc + 6 ppu's to be emulated, also the graphics-chip. not to mention the whole system itself, reconstructing busses etc.

definitely not gonna happen.

I wouldn't say it's not an option.
Emulation on the PC is very different from that of the consoles as the instruction sets and architectures are vastly different.
If Sony goes with PowerPC again and the instructions sets between the CPU architectures are backwards compatible, then that is allot of overhead that is saved as you don't need to interpret the code for the new architecture.

Converesely if Sony goes with Fermi or Graphics Core next, the GPU can actually handle some of the compute tasks traditionally handled by the processor.
The main problem though that I see is of a threaded nature, however the SPE's in the Cell are fairly basic, so emulating a couple of the SPE cores on a proper core could be possible provided IPC has increased a fair bit. (Which isn't to be unexpected, the Cell is old, and it's an in order architecture.)
However, that would still require a fair amount of software engineering, in that regard Sony isn't Microsoft and doesn't have the software engineers Microsoft has, so whether they will go down that road remains to be seen.