| Pemalite said: The thing with the CELL is how relatively "stupid" the SPE's are... They are a dual-issue, in-order, lacks branch prediction and generally doesn't do multiple instructions per clock... They aren't an instruction/extension powerhouse either. - What this means is that they are an emulators wet dream. - The simpler a core is, the better it is to emulate and the less overhead you have. |
Emulation is arguably getting easier in some aspects with modern systems like 7th gen consoles but by no means would I deem any of their hardware components to be "simple" including the Cell Broadband Engine ...
The biggest reason why emulation with modern systems are getting more feasible is because much of the software we see from them isn't being built to the bare metal so instead of designing emulation around a low level approach such as simulating the registers, opcodes, or caches we can instead design emulation using a high level approach where we simulate the OS and it's system calls ...
Believe it or not, quite a bit of modern software doesn't run directly on the hardware but they use kernels to interface with the hardware so in theory one could reimplement the kernel itself without having to worry about how the hardware itself would behave ...
The only advantage PS3 emulation has over Xbox 360 emulation is because there is less complexity in emulating the RSX in the PS3 compared to Xenos on the Xbox 360 ...
