Microsoft Researching an Xbox 360 Emulator for the Xbox One.

[Pemalite]

Adinnieken said:

The focus on frequency and not on Flops is where others fail to understand the power of the newer consoles.

The GPU of the Xbox 360 is .24TF.  The GPU of the Xbox One's GPU is 1.31TF.  More than 5X the processing power.  The Xbox 360 processor is capable of 0.06TF at 64-bit precision.  The Xbox One's processor is twice as powerful at 0.12TF at 64-bit precision.  With the Xbox One's GPU capable of handling CPU tasks, that puts the total processing power of the console at 1.43TF vs. the Xbox 360's 0.3TF.  Roughly 5x the processing power. 

If Microsoft is developing a VM for the console, they have 5x the original Xbox 360's power to do so with.  However, as I pointed out earlier in this thread, most likely they're developing it for an online service as this would provide a greater return on investment as well as long-term benefit.

Again, flops isn't important, nor is it an accurate denominator to gauge a systems performance.

Lets grab two 100Gflop CPU's, remove the L1, L2, L3 cache and hamper the interconnect bandwidth by a quarter.
They're still both 100Gflop processors, but the one that doesn't have the cache and full speed bus is going to be significantly slower and no amount of "programming trickery" will get around that.
Not to mention game engines and thus by extension games, deal with more than just floating point mathematics, integer performance is important too, your "flops" doesn't take that into account at all.

To add to that, the Xbox One due to it's more efficient architectures can actually get more work done, per-flop than the previous generation, due to efficiency gains, compounding how unimportant flops are.

Stop using flops. - It means sweet bugger all in the real world.

The problem with emulating is that some instructions will not translate directly, thus to be emulated it may need to be split up into two, three, four or more instructions to achieve the same effect, hence why emulating comes with it, orders of magnitude more powerfull hardware to be achieved.

Microsoft can lower that as they can write for the low-level API or directly to the metal, but you will *never* get around the need to split some instructions up.

As for the GPU, Xenos was a little more heavily customised chip compared to the Xbox One's graphics processor, for instance the Tessellator implementation is completely different and I'm not even sure if they would even be backwards compatible from a hardware perspective as pre-direct X 11 Radeons used a propriety implementation that relied on N-Patches.