Why PS4 needs to play PS3 games

[HappySqurriel]

VGKing said:

think-man said:
Well I think every new console should have BC to at LEAST its predecessor.

Yes and if PS4 is really 6-10x more poweful than a PS3, how hard could emulation be?

From my understanding, for perfect software emulation of a CPU you generally need more than 10 times the processing power; and with a moderately similar architecture, you can accomplish decent results with run-time instruction translation you would need (something like) 4 to 8 times the processing power.

With how exotic the Cell processor is, I don't think instruction traslation would have particularly good results on any existing architecture, and I don't think that there is a CPU that is powerful enough to handle a pure software emulation of it.