RPCS3 FAQ

Over in the xda dev forums we're talking about what kind of specs are needed to have a Next gen console on the latest phones. In particular we're talking about The latest Galaxy S4. A certain model of the S4, The GT I9500 or S4 Exynos runs a dual quad core system. 1 set of 4 cores running at 1.6 and another set running at 1.2 but only one set at any given time. In this discussion it is suggest the max settings would be to bypass and run all 8 cores with one set of four cores being 1.8 and the other being 1.4. Beyond that we all scratching our heads as to what is all required to emulate consoles like the PS3. And what better way to find out than the group that's working on one. So the question is...

What are the absolute minimum and recommended specs to emulate the PS3? And if you happen to know the specs required for the Xbox 360 and Wii we'd would appreciate that as well.

Sincerely,
Sincereless

Clearly the main issue is the CPU. PS3's Cell is powerful and hard to emulate due to lack of resources.

Cell is a multi-core microprocessor that combines a PPE (Power Processor Element) and up to 8 SPEs (Synergistic Processing Elements). The SPE units are responsible for vectorized floating point instructions, while the PPE is the real core of the PS3's CPU, responsible for managing all the other units.

In the PS3, one of the SPEs is not used, but each unit is clocked at 3.2Ghz. While this may seem a lot, remember that SPE units are more basic and mostly used to aid the main PPE unit, so we can't really say that the PS3's CPU has 8 cores (1 PPE + 7 SPE), but it's somewhat close.

In theory, emulating the 3.2Ghz PPE unit wouldn't be hard in a high-end PC, but emulating 7 more units at the same clock speed is quite an insane task.
Of course that we also have to consider that most applications don't use all of the PS3's power, but for accurate emulation, we would need to be able to emulate the equivalent of an 3.2Ghz 8-core processor.

If we consider, in terms of emulation, that we need about 10x more resources that the ones used by the console, we would need a huge ammount of processing power to accurately emulate the Cell microprocessor.

The same principles can be applied to the Xbox360 and the Wii.
The Xbox360's Xenon processor is equivalent to 3 PS3's PPE units (and no SPE units). It's processor is a custom tri-core PowerPC based CPU.

The Wii's Broadway processor is way less powerful, making it easier to emulate, but it still requires a lot of computing resources.
It's a single core CPU clocked at 729Mhz.

As a small comparison, the PSP's CPU is a single core MIPS R4000 based processor, clocked at 333Mhz.

So, as you can see, it's not easy to tell exactly how much processing power is needed, but not even the most recent PCs are ready to fully emulate the PS3 or the Xbox360.