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AndrewRyan

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CRank: 5Score: 12310

PS3 hacking may lead to early emulation!

We have all heard of emulators. If not let me explain; an emulator, is essentially a computer program that acts as another system. In this case, the program acts as a certain console. We have Nintendo emulators, Playstation emulators, Sega emulators, and many more. To make an emulator, people use reverse engineering on consoles and then program them for PC.
(A lot more complicated then it sounds)

Reverse engineering takes a very long time.
It is basically tearing a console down piece by piece and rewriting the code, which is why it is rare to see emulators of current gen systems. However with the PS3 being hacked it may come sooner then later.

Recently Graf_Chokolo a hacker who has contributed many things to the PS3 hacking scene was raided. He threatened Sony by saying that he would leak many things if he was pressured, and this morning he was. The police raided his private home and he kept true to his word and leaked his information over the internet. He says "The uploaded files contains his database which is a series of tools for the PS3′s Hypervisor and Hypervisor processes.It will help other devs to reverse engineer the hypervisor of PS3 further." With all this private information being gathered from the PS3, reverse engineering is much easier for developers and programmers.

What this means is that we may see a PS3 emulator sometime soon (and by soon I do not mean a couple of days) which excites many PC gamers and could potentially be devastating to Sony.

Dramscus4836d ago

I don't think it will be possible until the next generation of computer chips come out that use graphite rather than silicon. Current chips top out at like 2-4 ghz depending on cores and such. The more cores the less power the total unit needs to still be faster. It'll be extra difficult for present computers, to emulate more processors than they have themselves.
All speculative however and I'm mostly just debating points for fun.

Anyway good well written article.

young juice4835d ago

thought it was graphene not graphite.

Dramscus4835d ago

You are correct, mostly. However I am too as graphene is a single layer of graphite.

So yeah kudo's and a bubble for being in the know

AndrewRyan4834d ago (Edited 4834d ago )

The PS3 does not have 8 cores, it has only one full function core, then there are 8 SPEs, two of which are not used for processing in games. The SPEs are more like co-processors, they arent autonomous and they dont have the same instruction set as the main core nor do they even have a cache.
The main core is also an in order unit, with multithreading, its more comparable to the Intel Atom than the more sophisticated Phenom and Core 2 processors.

It is used for super computing because super computing relies greatly on the processor itself. For gaming, the processor is not used as much as the GPU itself. Unless a developer creates a game specifically for the processor which takes a very long time and a large amount of money.

In summary, computer processors can handle PS3 games.

ZombieAssassin4835d ago

Like Dramscus said I don't think we'll see a ps3 emulator running on too many PC's, I mean you need a computer much much more powerful than a ps2 just to run an emulator for that smoothly. It'll be pretty sweet though about 10 years from now if they do have them because we'll prolly be able to run all games at 60fps with a lot of AA and prolly higher resolutions.

Trroy4835d ago (Edited 4835d ago )

The SPUs would have to be emulated in software... and that just plain won't cut it. There are no chips that can lock away 256K of cache memory and pretend that its localstore for cache and data combined. The PS2 is different, because even though it has several parallel cores, they all ran at speeds considerably lower than that of modern day cores -- 300, 180, and 150 MHz respectively (less than 1/10th modern clocks, with tiny caches, etc.). The PS3 cores run at 3.2 GHz each -- and you won't be seeing PC cpus with individual cores running at 32 GHz... ever.

PCs will never, ever be able to run PS3 software, without some serious tech shakeup that physicists haven't even thought of yet. I'm not being overly dramatic, either.

Dramscus4835d ago

PCs will never, ever be able to run PS3 software, without some serious tech shakeup that physicists haven't even thought of yet. I'm not being overly dramatic, either.

Neve ever is a very long time, and with stuff like this http://www.bit-tech.net/new...
It's looking more like under a decade, Probably longer to full saturation but totally not never.

Also they do have cpu's out presently with six cores, it's not so much of a long shot to assume next year they'll be pushing eight to ten. So you don't need a single core with 32. Also it's been almost two years since multi core processors started appearing on a frequent basis. I don't even know if you can buy a new single core. If you can it's old and being cleared for new stock.
Still need another ten or twenty GHz to emulate nicely the specific architecture points. I've always read that you need 3-5 times as much power as the thing your trying to emulate to have it work smoothly. I'm sure with super good coding that could be lessened but your still basically making a computer with totally alien technology inside your standard pc.

Trroy4834d ago

The SPUs are not like regular cores, Dramscus.

No automated cache mechanism can emulate the way they operate. You can't simply pretend that any old core can emulate one -- they can't without the ability to lock away L2 cache memory and effectively use it like SPU localstore. Not to mention the difficulty -- I won't say impossible, for your benefit here =) -- of emulating the ring bus architecture that the SPUs reside on...

theonlylolking4835d ago

010010010010000001100100011011 1101101110011101000010000001110 1000110100001101001011011100110 1011001000000111001101101111001 011100000110100001010

Zeevious4835d ago (Edited 4835d ago )

MD2: dca4695f5d2ad9656428ec2395ad56 94
MD4: 377e99807dff350e0fc1c9d2952600 bc
MD5: 6f0bb63fdedc92c3ad071744e3df97 f1
CRC 8, ccitt, 16, 32 :

CRYPT (form: $ MD5? $ SALT $ CRYPT):
$1$uTiL9XXV$X5X2NJG.uQx3cPKaJ z7US1
(form: SALT[2] CRYPT[11]):
pspljCiRdTK2U

SHA1: a882fbe00b034afc4eeeb5c337830a a945713077
RIPEMD-160:
5198add842a2096be0b0168f88cbf2 97667935a4

...and Good Luck...

GodofSackboy4835d ago

Woah. Is that real?? If it is...wow

Thecraft19894835d ago (Edited 4835d ago )

No that's fake the guy posted it all warez sites anyone that downloaded proofed that it was full viruses. If want proof feel free to download it yourself its on his blog.

LightofDarkness4835d ago

Yeah, because that guy, ON HIS OWN, managed to reverse engineer the PS3's entire graphics library and architecture to produce an error free emulation of God of War 3, albeit with a lower framerate (which is for proofz, obv).

A word of advice, lad: if the van has free candy written on it, don't go inside.

Trroy4835d ago (Edited 4835d ago )

The fastest, best way to emulate a chip is to "recompile" code for the chip -- but you have to take into consideration that this method doesn't factor in parallel cores working in unison.

The PS3 can't really be emulated for that reason. You can't simply pretend that the SPU local stores work like a cache, and that the ring bus can be emulated completely, including the connectivity to the GPU and CPU both. The system is too complicated to work on similar speed cores with a different parallel architecture, and greater speed cores... well they just aren't going to happen... ever. More cores, sure, but the 10x or more required, for an individual core, to truly emulate the PS3 architecture? Heck no.

It can't be done in the foreseeable future. Don't kid yourself into thinking otherwise. Sony could stick a super Cell chip in the PS4, and *then* it would be possible for that chip to be backwards compatible with the PS3... but that's about it. No non-Cell chip will ever be able to emulate the PS3 Cell, due to the hardware/architectural differences and problems with emulating parallelism. And "bigger" Cells wouldn't be doing emulation -- they'd simply be backwards compatible.

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