Hardware Why can the Xbox One emulate the Xbox 360, but a PS4 can't emulate a PS3?

[MeAndHax]

I'm pretty sure everyone of you heard about the Xbox One's "Backward Compatibility", which supposedly emulates the Xbox 360 and allows you to run particular Xbox 360 games on your Xbox One. Everyone is talking about this but I saw no one explaining how it works? - is there an extra chip for this inside the console, or how is this possible?
On PlayStation we have "PlayStation Now" which is basically streaming PS3 that are being played on Sony's servers.
Now the question is: why does the PS4 have to stream all the PS3 games and the Xbox one can emulate them? And
Why can't all the games be emulated?
Thanks in advance

 

[yoshinatsu]

The architecture of the PS3's Cell processor is much more complicated and non-standard than the Xbox 360's PowerPC-based processor, which is fairly standard.
It's the same reason why some developers were struggling with PS3 ports (Bethesda comes to mind).
It was a very powerful processor for its time, but also very complex.
Think of something like the Saturn, which to this day hasn't been emulated accurately.

 

[TheLittlestBowl]

Aren't they special versions of the games? Pretty sure it downloads the game from Microsoft servers when you put a disc in.

 

[yoshinatsu]

Aren't they special versions of the games? Pretty sure it downloads the game from Microsoft servers when you put a disc in.

Yes, but if I recall correctly, each of those downloads also includes a version of that Xbox 360 emulator specifically configured for each game.

 

[shadoom]

Because Microsoft spent money to write an emulator and sony didn't

 

[yoshinatsu]

Because Microsoft spent money to write an emulator and sony didn't

Even if they did, I honestly don't think it's doable with the PS4's (or even the PS4 Pro's) hardware.
At least not at an acceptable performance.
For all intents and purposes, Cell was a mistake.

 

[wolfmankurd]

The architecture of the PS3's Cell processor is much more complicated and non-standard than the Xbox 360's PowerPC-based processor, which is fairly standard.
It's the same reason why some developers were struggling with PS3 ports (Bethesda comes to mind).
It was a very powerful processor for its time, but also very complex.
Think of something like the Saturn, which to this day hasn't been emulated accurately.

Even if they did, I honestly don't think it's doable with the PS4's (or even the PS4 Pro's) hardware.
At least not at an acceptable performance.
For all intents and purposes, Cell was a mistake.

Yup, if I remember right the 360 had 3 PowerPC cores named PPE. I believe in the PS3 along with 8 SPE cores the Cell processor had 2 of those PPE cores.

The Cell architecture was odd indeed. Sony made a mistake in that tried to continue the success of the PS2 thinking bigger and more complex was better. It's not the future is RISC.

 

[chartube12]

Yes, but if I recall correctly, each of those downloads also includes a version of that Xbox 360 emulator specifically configured for each game.

Yes and no. The xbone has a virtual 360 installed on it directly. but it's only emulating the cpu or gpu (i forget which one). the special games have part of thier code ported to use the xbone's processor. The one the xbone isnt emulating. Some games, like the multi disc titles do come with a small set of special instructions. But other then that, making games compatible is easy. Major Nelson suspects microsoft, programmed an over night build bot for the partial porting process. According to him every 360 game is capable of being made xbox one compatible. In theory, he once said even wii and wii u titles could be bought over the same way.