Predictions Of Further PSP Release Delay Floated

Thanks to CNN Money for its article discussing the possible further delay of Sony's PSP handheld. According to the piece: "Activision CEO Bobby Kotick told investors yesterday that his company does not expect the PSP to launch in North America until the second quarter [of 2005]." It's explained: "The PSP was originally scheduled to go on sale worldwide this holiday season. In February, Sony pushed back the U.S. launch of the system to the first quarter of 2005, but said it still planned to launch on schedule in Japan." The article also comments on possible PSP battery life issues, suggesting "...those putting games together for the system say Sony has urged them to avoid streaming game levels from the Universal Media Disk, to lengthen the system's battery life."

Comments

How to suck eggs

[Kris_J]

"...those putting games together for the system say Sony has urged them to avoid streaming game levels from the Universal Media Disk, to lengthen the system's battery life."

Any half decent developer will have worked this out without needing any prompting by Sony. In fact, I doubt the quote is true. Instead, I'm sure that developers are busily determining how best to trade off the disc against RAM against CPU time. If CPU time is "cheaper" than reading from disc, then files will be compressed on the disc and decompressed into RAM -- unless RAM is so tight that data has to remain compressed in RAM until needed (or the SPU is so slow that decompressing data slows disc access, since power drain is related much more to the disc spinning than data actually being read). But if running the CPU at 100% impacts battery life (or the overhead affects game performance) too much, developers will still stream data off the disc. This is where real programmers shine and development houses that rely on high level development tools suffer.

Of course, if they'd gone with cartridges, the power draw and loading times would be significantly less.