The complete specifications for the forthcoming PSP have been announced, revealing a versatile multimedia system much closer to the PS2 in power than expected, and even outperforming its home console sibling in certain areas...
The PSP architecture is powered by a MIPS R4000 CPU core - two of them in fact, with one being designated as the CPU core and another as the "Media Engine". It's not clear whether these cores will both be accessible by game applications, but if so, the system actually has more raw processing power than the PS2 - which is based on a single modified R5900 CPU, the Emotion Engine. The main PSP CPU will feature floating point and vector floating point co-processors, as well as 3D-CG extended instructions - both of which are absent from the Media Engine, which in effect means that the Media Engine (assuming its usable in-game) will have limited use to gaming applications, but could be used to make certain processor-intensive tasks work. Graphics in the PSP are driven by a combination of two graphics cores. Graphics Core 2 is similar to the Graphics Synthesizer in the PlayStation 2, but it runs at around half the clock speed of its PS2 counterpart (166Mhz compared with 300Mhz) and as such, has about half of the theoretical polygon throughput (a decent measure of raw graphical power) of the PS2. Perhaps more interesting is Graphics Core 1, which offers a range of 3D curved surface and other hardware 3D functionality. How useful the more advanced functions in this core will be to development remains to be seen - Sony is likely to make a lot of noise about the NURBS and curved surface abilities of the PSP, but in the real world, developing games to use these tools is extremely difficult and most developers are likely to fall back on good old polygons. However, there's no doubt that other functions of Core 1 - such as compressed texture handling and proper hardware clipping - will speed up graphics on the PSP significantly, and developers who do decide to use the curved surface abilities may well turn out some very impressive games. In terms of audio, the PSP is also ahead of its home console brethren - with reconfigurable DSPs and full multi-channel 3D sound in hardware, both of which are missing from the PS2. It also features a high quality digital video decoder for playing back movies from the UMD discs. Source & Full article: Gamesindustry
The PSP architecture is powered by a MIPS R4000 CPU core - two of them in fact, with one being designated as the CPU core and another as the "Media Engine". It's not clear whether these cores will both be accessible by game applications, but if so, the system actually has more raw processing power than the PS2 - which is based on a single modified R5900 CPU, the Emotion Engine. The main PSP CPU will feature floating point and vector floating point co-processors, as well as 3D-CG extended instructions - both of which are absent from the Media Engine, which in effect means that the Media Engine (assuming its usable in-game) will have limited use to gaming applications, but could be used to make certain processor-intensive tasks work. Graphics in the PSP are driven by a combination of two graphics cores. Graphics Core 2 is similar to the Graphics Synthesizer in the PlayStation 2, but it runs at around half the clock speed of its PS2 counterpart (166Mhz compared with 300Mhz) and as such, has about half of the theoretical polygon throughput (a decent measure of raw graphical power) of the PS2. Perhaps more interesting is Graphics Core 1, which offers a range of 3D curved surface and other hardware 3D functionality. How useful the more advanced functions in this core will be to development remains to be seen - Sony is likely to make a lot of noise about the NURBS and curved surface abilities of the PSP, but in the real world, developing games to use these tools is extremely difficult and most developers are likely to fall back on good old polygons. However, there's no doubt that other functions of Core 1 - such as compressed texture handling and proper hardware clipping - will speed up graphics on the PSP significantly, and developers who do decide to use the curved surface abilities may well turn out some very impressive games. In terms of audio, the PSP is also ahead of its home console brethren - with reconfigurable DSPs and full multi-channel 3D sound in hardware, both of which are missing from the PS2. It also features a high quality digital video decoder for playing back movies from the UMD discs. Source & Full article: Gamesindustry
