A quick question. Nintendo making the NX BC might be a great selling point fore some (it would be for me), but BC through physical means (putting WiiU chips on the system) might be too expensive for Nintendo's liking. So, if the NX had an emulator capable of playing most WiiU games (similar to the XBone with the 360), how much power would it need? And would it be viable from the start? I suppose the Gamepad wouldn't be a problem, they could just use the mobile part to simulate the gamepad, this is just in terms of specs.

That depends mostly on what type of architecture they go for. The less like the WiiU their new console's hardware is, the more power they'll need to emulate it. We won't know much power they'll need until we have a better idea of what will be inside the NX (assuming it's a home console).

Assuming it didn't have compatible chips it would typically take a computer about ten times the power. Some emulators can be more efficient but the target would have to be reliable emulation rather than speed so even that would be a great achievement.

It's made harder because it wouldn't be able to split the emulation of a core over multiple cores. So each core of the Wii U would have to be emulated on a single cpu core approximately 10 times as powerful. As I understand it, splitting the emulation of a core over multiple cores caurses issues getting things synchronised that effectively slows it down.

Assuming the NX architecture is completely different, they will need a lot of power for sure.

They might gave to drop it all together if it's completely different.

Well, I heard on VGC that you'd need a NASA supercomputer to be able to run a Wii U emulator decently within 6 years, so maybe about 20 petaflops or so.

Just kidding. If they go for an x86 architecture, then it would probably need to be a bit ahead of the PS4 in terms of power (using the 360 emulation on the XBO as a frame of reference).

That's hard to tell if you want to hear GHz or GFLOPS.

A Skylake core at 3.2 Ghz is roughly 5 times more powerful than a Xbox 360 Xenon core with the same clock speed.

And I doubt that Nintendo could make an emulator as efficient as the Xbox 360 emulator on Xbox One. They aren't that good at making emulators tbh, there are more accurate emulators out there than their Virtual Console games.

This is something people often ignore. The 360 emulator on the XBO is probably the most efficient emulator there is. It is helped by Microsoft being primarily a software company, that has developed computer Operating Systems and other PC software since their inception. Sure, Nintendo is a software company in the sense that their games are software, but neither Nintendo nor Sony (nor basically any other company on the globe) has the same expertise as Microsoft has in this field.

Not much. They are absorbing the Wii U's architecture for a reason.

Over 9000?

I really don't know :c

Still if the power needed is just too much for the current hardware/prices then I could see Nintendo porting or having ported by someone else the biggest games on the console like let's say Splatoon, Zelda U and XCX