Thread: PSP Emulator for the N900, why not?
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Alex Atkin UK is offline Alex Atkin UK
2009-11-21 , 21:23
Posts: 716 | Thanked: 303 times | Joined on Sep 2009 @ Sheffield, UK
#29
Originally Posted by Johnx View Post
In terms of the speed difference required to emulate a different CPU architecture at full speed, I've heard numbers between 6x and 12x, which probably makes sense if the PSP emu needs a 2GHz x86 CPU to run full speed. Also keep in mind that clock-for-clock I think that (even one core of) a Core 2 Duo is faster than our little Cortex A8. Starting a PSP emu now and hoping that it will run closer to playable speed (maybe without ssound?) on a dual-core Cortex-A9 OMAP4 sometime in 2011 or 2012, might be a lot more reasonable. Hopefully they'll (ARM? TI?) get us more internal bandwidth by then...

@davedickson: I definitely think you shoulc do your proposed qemu experiment. Even if it doesn't turn out to be "playable" I think it'll be a lot of fun and you'll learn a lot on the way. If you want advice on where to get started, stop by #maemo with an open mind and some free time.

-John
From what I have read around I believe the basic, original version, of the Atom is still about twice as powerful as the N900 CPU. The Cortex A9 has been said that it could possibly get close to the dual-core Atom 330 but by then no doubt an even faster Atom will be out, which still will be considered SLOW in desktop PC terms.

I was looking at CPUs recently to upgrade an old PC. The basic Atom CPU is not even as powerful as my mid 2003 Athlon XP 3200+, so you have to be realistic about what the N900 can do especially as there is this horrible rumour that Nokia have said the N900 cannot hit 600Mhz sustained without going up in smoke. (which is mental, nobody should ever release a consumer device which can be physically broken via software, it should have thermal management that shuts it down before that happens)