I was under the impression that the CPU in the PS4 was able to clock itself up to 2.75GHz when under heavy use? I swear I've read that or heard it somewhere before...
On the PC AMD's CPU's have this ability to "turbo" I haven't read anything to indicate the PS4 or Xbox One can do the same trick.
How that is accomplished on the PC is by shutting down or down clocking some of the cores so instead of all 8 cores putting out X watts of heat you have less cores putting out the same watts of heat so you can up clock them. So if your heat sink can soak up 100 watts you can pick running all 8 cores at 3Ghz or 4 cores running at close to 5Ghz. Handy if your game only supports 1 or 2 cores.
I don't see why they wouldn't include that ability on the consoles, but maybe AMD didn't sell them those types of chips? (Not sure how expensive it is in terms of silicon real estate since it requires at least a thermal diode on each core? With out doing some research I am grasping at straws here.)
Even if that is the case, it's no match for the intel i5 or i7 that you need to get the kind of performance the OP is looking for.
Very true, the CPU in the PS4 and the Xbox One is not even a full performance AMD core like Vishera or Zambezi they are AMD's low end CPU's. The new consoles are not designed around the CPU. They instead lean on really fantastic GPU's to do the majority of the work.
We sort of have stepped back in time, the NEC TG-16 had a 16 bit GPU with an 8 bit CPU (the same CPU the NES had, well sort of it.... it ran a little faster?)
Great for games made and designed for these consoles, less so if your trying to make the console emulate something that was designed in the old style of powerful CPU's combined with mid to low end GPU's.
Edit: I should put in some sort of disclaimer here... lol I am not a computer scientist just an avid hobbyist who does enjoy the nuts and bolts of how CPU's and GPU's operate. So take what I am saying as it is, most of it is probably correct but specific details may not be exact. (for instance the 3Ghz to 5GHz thing. It really depends on the model, how many NM's the chip is, liquid or air cooled, a lot of variables.)
Edit 2: Adding a little bit of complexity to the issue here is that PPC code tends to be more compact than X86 instructions. Usually 50%+ on average, so an emulator would need to translate those instructions into X86 code and that makes emulation a lot tougher. Spending more time translating instructions.
I do think that a Xbox (original) emulator might be easier to pull off in this case. That would be pretty interesting playing Halo 1 and 2 on the PS4.