Anyway, my point was in response to Akira's assertion that Sony doesn't provide BC because it's hard, but MS doesn't provide BC because they hate you and want to make your life miserable. Which is obviously bollocks.
Both companies don't do it because it doesn't make them enough money, anything else is merely good marketing.
Is not bollocks, best example for this would be ... PS2 software emulation, initially the had a physical chip capable of PS2 emulation, however this was way too costly for Sony in the first few years (as you said), therefore they decided to drop it.
Then you got people who jailbroke the thing and could not make the thing emulate PS2 games, even PS2 on a powerful PC is really complicated, only a few games can do this and ... is really complicated for them, the way they were coded was to make the most out of the PS2 architecture, which followed a very complex processing scheme, more specifically this one:
Meaning that both hackers and Sony needed to emulate a main core, couple of vector units, a graphics synthesizer, etc. All of this using parallel programming to make all the cores work like they do in a physical PS2, this also had to be done in an organized matter as the PS2 had an specific way to process and render graphics:
For the PS3 this is at least 2 or 3 times worst because all games are fitted to make the most out the CELL architecture, which is even more complex as it uses 6 physical cores to make all the processing tasks, nowadays even developers find it hard to make the most out of the total power of the console (the PS3 is actually more powerful than the Wii and the 360, however it's convoluted architecture and core optimization makes it a total mystery to get everything out of the hardware).
Meanwhile, both Original xbox and the 360 uses a traditional PC-like architecture to process the games, original xbox was so flexible that hacked versions could run linux-debian and they could actually emulate PSX software, the 360 also has a simplified architecture, so it isn't as complex and actually archiveable.
Is that a new technical term or do you work for Sony marketing department.
As far as the Supercharged PC architecture goes, it will basically orientate all the system processing capabilities towards a unified architecture to use the most out of the system (unlike the previous PS3 architecture). The 'supercharged' part comes from the use of the single unified pool of high-speed memory, making the 8GB of GDDR5 RAM fully and easily addressable by both the CPU and GPU. Meaning that they bypassed some of the physical limitations that PCIe ports have (in actual PC GFXs) in order to make the most out of them. Sony reps also said that the thing will actually have 1 chip with a shared pool of memory, communicating each other with a 256-bit bus capable of archiving 176 GB per second.
Xbox One still struggles to explain it's architecture and how processing will work with a DDR3 memory running at 68Gb/s at best. Using a ESRAM with a 256-bit processor, working out two memory pools, it's theoretical cap is 204GB/s, but this has been a matter of discussion because tests have shown a cap of 150GB/s, and is unclear where the developer have to use coding to reach the 204 GB/s or if the system is actually capable of it.
