Speaking at the Hot Chips Conference at Stamford University this week a Sony spokesperson has outlined further details of their upcoming Playstation Portable (PSP) handheld gaming console. Clearly designed to go head to head with the upcoming Nintendo DS in a market that has traditionally been dominated by Nintendo, the Sony device has some very interesting features.
Central to the system is the CPU, which will be a MIPS R4000 capable of speeds up to 333MHz. That should be enough to handle most multimedia applications, including video playback. The graphics core is expected to run at half the CPU speed, around 166Mhz, which Sony say will provide a 35 million polygon per second capability. Also expect to see alpha blending, fogging and texture mapping, as well as a whole host of other graphical capabilities. Not bad for a device you can hold in your hand.
The PSP is also going to have 4MB of integrated memory, half of which will be dedicated to the media processor, and the other half to the CPU. Previous reports of the PSP showed a total of 8MB of memory, so this announcement of half that has come as a surprise to some.
Sony are also keen to push the fact that the PSP integrates what they are calling their Virtual Media Engine (VME). This is a reconfigurable core which allows the main chip to offload calculations when it's workload becomes high.
Well, it's certainly going to be an exciting year for portable gaming consoles when the Nintendo DS and the PSP come out. Will Sony be able to usurp Nintendo from one of it's strongest markets? With specs like these, we certainly think they may be able to. We'll keep you posted.