Key to efficient hardware emulation is an efficient mapping to the underlying CPU’s opcodes. Here one is free to target opcodes that may or may not have been imagined for that particular use. For emulators like the RPCS3 PlayStation 3 emulator this has led to some interesting mappings, as detailed in a video by [Whatcookie].

It’s important to remember here that the Cell processor in the PlayStation 3 is a bit of an odd duck, using a single regular PowerPC core (PPE) along with multiple much more simple co-processors called synergistic processing elements (SPEs) all connected with a high-speed bus. A lot of the focus with Cell was on floating point vector – i.e. SIMD – processing, which is part of why for a while the PlayStation 3 was not going to have a dedicated GPU.

As a result, it makes perfect sense to do creative mapping between the Cell’s SIMD instructions and those of e.g. SSE and AVX, even if Intel removing AVX-512 for a while caused major headaches. Fortunately some of those reappeared in AVX2.

The video goes through a whole range of Cell-specific instructions, how they work, and what x86 SIMD instructions they were mapped to and why. The SUBD instruction for example is mapped to VPDPBUSD as well as VDBPSADBW in AVX-512, the latter of which mostly targets things like video encoding. In the end it’s the result that matters, even if it also shows why the Cell processor was so interesting for high-performance compute clusters back in the day.