Slashdot Mirror
PlayStation Portable Chip Details
boarder8925 writes "The Register posted an article today that detailed the PlayStation Portable's chip specs. The CPU will run at up to 333MHz, and its frontside bus at up to 166MHz. The graphics system, operating across a 512-bit bus, will be capable of rendering 664m pixels per second and 35m polygons per second. Its core, operating at 166MHz, will include 2MB integrated buffer DRAM."
exactly how many backpacks of batteries am I going to need to go 24 hours without a socket? /gba owner and proud of it.
What does one cow say to the other? Moo.
Granted, my understanding of electronics isn't what it should be, but I always find it amazing that the processors used in these things can be so slow considering the requirements of most PC software these days.
"Sony will also build in a dedicated security engine, which it *hopes* will eliminate game piracy and attempts to hack the system." (emphasis mine)
Oh, just like with the PS2 and PS1, right? Even the GBA has a flash card you can use to play ROMs and NES games. I understand that they need to be able to say they put effort into preventing piracy, I just found it funny they had hope.
I'm a little surprised at this statistic, when the PS3's cell chip is supposed to be 65nm fabbed.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
On a pure polygon basis, that's ~50% of a PS/2 in your pocket or about ~25% of an Xbox in pure polygon performance.
Naturally, these are meaningless numbers...but if does give you a hint (especially given the pixel real estate being small) that the PSP will have proper, immersive 3D gaming capability...which I guess has been shown to good effect with the GT4 demo.
-psy
Maybe it's just me, but it sure doesn't sound like the PSP is going to be that energy efficient with specs like that. What good is an impressive portable system that sucks batteries worse than a Sega Game Gear?
Or, you know, you could play video games on it.
Honestly, I never understand why people want everything to run an OS. Oh noes, the kernel corrupted on my linux toaster. Now it burns on one side and does nothing on the other.
What luck for rulers, that men do not think. - Adolph Hitler
seriously, this things is gonna draw way too much juice. 333mhz processors, huge screen, optical drive, etc... No matter how good the systems specs are, if battery life doesn't cut it, its going to be smoke by gameboy.
Things are not as they appear, nor are they otherwise
probability for sony to allow 3rd party apps: 0%.
sad truth. if you want to code for a portable there's plenty around already though, zaurus, palms, pocketpc's, mobile phones, gp32..
(gba doesn't count, you can't officially create your own apps)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Just thinking about where people play their gameboys. Is it really that far out of reach of a power source? Cars have the lighter ac converter and I recall always being able to find an outlet for my laptop at the airports.
Even back in the day when I had a game gear, I almost always had a place to plug it in.
mod parent up
The reason that you can do more with consoles than you can with PC games, even though consoles tend to have lower specs is that when you know what hardware the program will be running on you can do a lot more optimization.
When you have a single hardware configuration and the time to learn exaclty how it performs under what circumstances you can squeeze a lot more performance out of that hardware.
Another reasont that we don't see the same performance out of modern PC applications (game or otherwise) is that as hardware progresses, optimization gives way to higher level languages, coding styles, etc. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but if every application was optimized as much as console applications are (and if it were even possible given the variety of hardware), you'd be able to run $your_favorite_os, $your_favorite_office_suite, $your_favorite_media_player, and $your_favorite_web_browser all at the same time quite comfortably on a 300mz machien with 64 megs of ram.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
gah, hate to reply to myself, should have used preview.... forgot a chunk of what I was going to say
You also have to consider that this hardware is designed specifically for games. Standard pc hardware is very general in nature, but console hardware is not standard PC hardware, it's put together to be able to perform in exactly the ways where games need performance.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
The Cube *still* doesn't have a flourishing pirate scene because of how well Nintendo did. Small games can be loaded into main RAM over the network from a PC, or what have you, but it's such a pain in the butt it isn't worth it.
It's easier and cheaper to rent until you're done playing.
"Eliminate piracy" is a sort of statistical phrase. At least one person will eventually pirate on any system. The issue at hand is whether the pirated copies are being sold on the streets of hong kong.
"crippled by 640KB of memory."
Are we talking about the PS2, or the PS/2?
Seriously. The whole reason i own a gameboy SP (and i imagine why its so popular) is because i can put it in my pocket easily and take it on travel. Plane rides, train rides, backseat of the car. ALL of those places are tough to get any sort of power plug from. Yeah ok the car you may be able to plug in the cigarette lighter but thats about all. many times you can't though. At least on my travel. I haven't traveled in a plane yet for my budget that gives me a plug in recepticle.
.. i have XBOX Computer/PS2 whatever else. Why play the portable when you're not moving.
99% of my gameboy play is in that travel mode. I mean hell, when i'm home
Who makes you Sig?
But they're promoting GT4 on the PSP as the killer app...
Also, they promised you'd be able to transfer saves of many games between PS2 and PSP, which only makes sense if the game the saves belong to is a port, no?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
It really might not be that big of a deal, I almost always play my GBA within easy reach of a power source, so the PSP would be fine for me if your thinking about powering it. However, I'm not going to buy a very expensive new portable system just to play Metal Gear Card Battle Deluxe. If they don't get some abosolutely must have games that aren't available anywhere else then it's going to fail in a big way.
I'm just looking forward to playing games with a little more action and carnage. You just don't find games like Twisted Metal and Grand Theft Auto on the GBA.
A little nonsense now and then, is relished by the wisest men... --Willy Wonka
A lot of comments here have focused on battery life. I think that the integrated chipset may have another potential benefit. It may make the PSP easier to develop for. If this is the case, it will give the PSP a better chance of competing with the GBA and the DS. It has already been reported that Gran Turismo for the PSP will be a nearly straight port from the PS2 version. Assuming this is not overly difficult, it means that the PSP should be able to draw on the large library of PSOne and PS2 games for its first generation. Hopefully some brand new stuff will be made too, but living off of ports isn't so bad in the first year.
Ease of development was a big plus for the original Playstation. And the initial difficulty of development hobbled the PS2 (killed Saturn). Hopefully Sony is designing the PSP with development considerations in mind. Of course those batteries had better last more than a couple of hours too!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Don't forget Sony is using their "minidisc' media (or whatever they call it). That's going to be spinning an awful lot for loading and such. I think that will be the biggest drain of all.
Have you ever used a minidisc player? They have incredible battery life. My old minidisc player can last days before I need to recharge the batteries and that's with playing it most of the time.
As most of the other comments and articles point out the media IO is not going to be as big as a drain as powering the screen and the rest of the CPU.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
Nintendo has had years to perfect the design of the gameboy. sony may be a bit naive by trying to cram in too much power into a battery-sucking device.
they need to balance power vs battery life