<font color=DarkGray>Sony Computer Announces Particulars of PlayStation Portable
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August 1, 2003 (TOKYO) -- "The PlayStation Portable (PSP) will establish itself as the most vigorous category of the PlayStation family," said Ken Kutaragi, representative director and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc, in the "PlayStation Meeting 2003" that opened on July 29, making public particulars of hardware of the portable game machine now under development.
Ken Kutaragi, CEO, Sony Computer Entertainment
The PSP consists of four major components: a microcontroller called the PSP CPU, a liquid-crystal panel with a resolution of 480 x 272 pixels, a playback unit for optical disc media (UMD: universal media disc) with a capacity of 1.8GB on two layers on a single side, and a wireless LAN module conforming to the IEEE802.11 standard. The wireless LAN module was planned, as of May 2003, to be offered as an option using an extension slot. However, the company decided on the standard implementation due to "strong requests from game creators" as expressed by Kutaragi.
Powerful Integration of Two CPU Cores and 12MB DRAM
SCE integrated into the PSP CPU various functions, such as two MIPS-type "R4000" CPU cores, 3D graphics drawing circuits, a DSP core for audio processing based on the dynamic reconfigurable technology, and 12MB DRAM.
The 3D graphics drawing circuits work at a rate of 166MHz. It can handle not only polygons, but also a modeling method called non-uniform rational B-splines (NURBS) by leveraging hardware. Performance for drawing polygons is said to reach a maximum of 33 million polygons per second.
Its image coding system is the newest version of MPEG called "H.264" (MPEG-4 AVC). This system, featuring a higher compression ratio that is twice or larger than MPEG-2, is expected to be internationally standardized within 2003. It has started to draw attention as an alternative to MPEG-4 Visual, which is still unpopular in the market due to license issues.
Aiming at use in the PSP, it has developed the optical disc media "UMD" with a capacity of 1.8GB on two layers on a single side, which is sufficient for storing two-hour videos with quality equivalent to DVDs (when coded into a digital bit stream at 2Mbps). In the presentation, the company compared images coded into a stream at 2Mbps using MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile with those coded at 2Mbps based on H.264. The H.264 performance was highly appraised due to higher picture quality. Kutaragi commented, "Less noise and fine colors."
PSP's system configuration
What the inside of a microcontroller looks like
Graphics function
Related story: Sony to Boost In-House Microchip Production, Double CCD Output, Mass Produce CMOS Sensors at SCE Plant
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(Masayuki Arai, Hiroki Eda, Staff Editors, Nikkei Electronics)
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