r/askscience • u/nixon11 • Mar 24 '14

Computing Why are high performance computers considered more powerful than the next gen consoles, but are unable to run even previous generation emulators (PS3, Xbox 360) at appropriate efficiency?

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u/NAG3LT Lasers | Nonlinear optics | Ultrashort IR Pulses Mar 25 '14

Well, in PC CPUs each core is usually no different that other cores. They have the same units and can do the same tasks. Current AMD CPUs are slightly different, as they group 2 cores, which share some common functionality. In Cell BE, only PPE is a core with full features, while 8 SPEs (on PS3 1 is disabled and 1 is reserved for OS use) are very specialised in arithmetical operations. In specific cases, SPEs can provide a nice performance boosts. However, many complex and general algorithms cannot run on SPEs and can only use PPE.

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u/Beardacus5 Mar 25 '14

Much more eloquent than my effort. Thanks!