| Dr.Henry_Killinger said: Its not that simple. Let me complicated it for you. I don't have specs, but I don't need those I have logic. A common misconception of CPU's is the correlation between power and speed (clock rate). Clock rate only increases power, if the faster cpu executes more instructions in the same amount of time as the slower one. This is hard because complex instructions typically take more time. The PS3 cpu was not only fast, but able to run complex instructions fast cause of proprietary shit or something. Point is, trying to emulate that is going to take a cpu that is basically just as fast or at least specialized, a near impossible task when also trying to change the architecture, decent emulation of PS3 games would need a top tier PC, in a console its a pipe dream. However, emulation is not the only way for backwards compatibility, XB1's backwards compatibility for instance, is not emulation. |
PS3 was the last in a long line of games consoles to feature bespoke, 'exotic' hardware - in this case, the Cell processor with its ultra-fast satellite co-processors - the SPUs. The general direction of hardware design in the industry has moved away from those ideas - the SPU set-up is almost completely alien to the way CPUs are made these days - so while the PS4's processing cores are relatively capable, emulating the SPUs in real-time would be a colossal undertaking from an engineering perspective. In part, this explains why Sony undertook cloud streaming with PlayStation Now - getting that to work was challenging enough, but I suspect it's a more straightforward task than running six 3.2GHz SPUs on a low-power 1.6GHz x86 cluster.
Source: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-06-19-dont-hold-your-breath-for-ps4-backwards-compatibility
