Yes judging by the amount of people here and other sites like gaf, there sure seems to be sizable a interest in having native BC compatibility in all of the consoles. Even sony admits this, but said that most do not use it and so they said it is not something they will pursue. For the main reason that the TC stated, the focus on PS now.
Looking deeper into it, around 2 years ago Mark Cerny made this statement:
“Backwards compatibility, particularly in Japan, is something that is strongly brought frequently, so we thought long and hard about this. Realistically, to support backwards compatibility with PS3, the CELL Broadband Engine would have needed to been part of the new console. Currently, it’s not possible to simulate this via software. If CELL were the only requirement, that wouldn’t have been much of an issue.”
“We would also need to support the supporting hardware indefinitely. We can freely manufacture CELL if the decision is made that it is needed. However, that’s not the case with supporting hardware. There are parts which will become difficult to obtain since 7 years is already considered to be long in the IT industry…”
Which seems to suggests that the Cell could be emulated by the PS4, but when you factor in everything else like (GPU OS overhead) it would be too much for the PS4.
But this was 2 years ago, maybe now they could try something like game specific profiles.
Good thread.
