Unless the computer is using the same hardware as a 360, you will need a computer much more powerful than a 360, but they aren't as common as they will be in a few years so there won't be too much people to use the 360 emulator.
Anyway I think that with Windows 8 Microsoft is allowing computers to use Xbox Live and perhaps play Xbox 360 games (or NextBox games, I have a crazy feeling though that the NextBox is going to be a computer running a special Windows 8 OS with the games designed to be optimized to it's hardware, if that's the case I may skip getting the Wii U and a gaming PC and just go for the NextBox, It will be an amazing and smart move, since Microsoft is mostly computer people, it will be logical to do so)
lets hope so, if windows 8 leans closer to the architecture of the nextbox, than it'll be a real emulating party
360 emulation won't happen any time soon.
The 360 CPU is a 3.6 Ghz tricore PowerPC CPU that needs to be emulated.
That won't ever work on a simple hexa/octa core CPU.
Besides it's way cheaper to buy a 360 then a beast computer that is capable of emulating a 360 somewhere in 2020.
2020 seems overreacted, 2016 seems more like it, surely the hardware pc world will keep evolving?
The moment we will have PC's that have roughly 3x more processing power then the XBox 360, same goes for GPU's. That should about cover the losses on architecture emulation and OS resources.
Just to explain what I mean in more detail...
CPU-wise, it's 6 Operations Per Cycle x 2 Hardware Threads x 3 Physical Processors x 3.2GHz clock rate = 115.2 GFLOPs for the XBox360. Go on ahead and check how high the i7 ranks, you might be unpleasantly suprised.
Consoles are specifically designed for the purpose of gaming - computers are not. It will take about 10 years to properly emulate the 360. In fact, we don't even have a good XBox emulator to begin with.
just googled and the highest FLOPS any cpu got according to wiki:
As of 2010, the fastest six-core PC
processor reaches
109 GFLOPS (
Intel Core i7 980 XE)
[14] in double precision calculations.
GPUs are considerably more powerful. For example,
Nvidia Tesla C2050 GPU computing processors perform around 515 GFLOPS
[15] in double precision calculations, and the AMD FireStream 9270 peaks at 240 GFLOPS.
[16]
surely i must be forgetting something, else this is a pleasant surprise!