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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.
"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.
Sony's got a habit of boasting about their products before releasing them at lower specs... I doubt that the PS3's processor will be 65nm considering that the major chipmaking companies are having a hell of a hard time with 90nm anyway and there really isn't a need for the chip to be 65nm right now anyway...
http://chrono.posterous.com/
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.
I hate to break all your dream, but technology has moved forward quite a bit since the Gamegear... Both for batteries AND power consumption.
The latest PocketPCs are using a Xscale at 600+MHz and they have HOURS of autonomy. My older Dell PDA (only a 300MHz Xscale) can play games for 6+ hours before needing a recharge (and using a PSX emulator with games on a microdrive)) and the battery was not even that impressive. I could watch a movie for ~1.5h.
Sure, they may not reach the portability level of a GBA (which itself is years behind a Palm, that could live MONTHS on 2 AAA), but it may be *enough*.
Then again, maybe not... so, wait and see...
It's because it's not the clock frequency that matters; it's also the ammount of work per cycle that matters. Not only that, they're not general purpose processors, they're tailored for the need. GPUs, per example, are clocked much lower than most desktop CPUs, but don't try beating them pushing polygons with your brand new Athlon.
Also, there's a lot of crud the CPU won't be dealing with - the OS is much more minimal and oriented just for games.
That being said, 333MHz it's quite a lot of processing power. I'm amazed they can get chips clocked higher and higher into portables while keeping the power consupmtion down.
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"
Now, given their claim of 35 million polys/sec, and Sony's knack for boasting, you'll probably only see 1-5 million/sec (many developers will take advantage of the power stepping and opt for lower detail for longer battery life). For comparrison's sake, the PS1 was able to do something like 300 thousand polys/sec, so the detail level will be very significant for a portable device.
Odd that they'd boast the fill rate, though. At a resolution that low (compared to PC resolutions), it really shouldn't be an issue at all. The only way that would really matter is if they have a ton of texture combiners and pipelines, which wasn't explicitly stated. Should be neat to see this thing in action.
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I'd rather be flamed than ignored.
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?