PSP
The PlayStation Portable is a handheld game console released and currently manufactured by Sony Computer Entertainment. Its development was first announced during E3 2003, and it was officially unveiled on May 11, 2004 at a Sony press conference before E3 2004. The system was released in Japan on December 12, 2004, the United States and Canada on March 24, 2005 and in Europe and Australia on September 1, 2005. It is considered the first handheld video game system to use an optical disc format (Universal Media Disc).
A new slimmer and lighter version of the PlayStation Portable, titled Slim and Lite, was announced on July 11, 2007 and Sony’s press conference at E3 2007. It will be available in the US, Europe and Japan in September 2007 with various colours and a very different box packaging to the current PSP. Among these versions three were physically shown at E3 2007: a white version with a Star Wars imprint, a piano black version and an ice silver version.
The PlayStation Portable was designed by Shin’ichi Ogasawara for the Sony Computer Entertainment subsidiary of Sony Corporation. Early models were made in Japan but in order to cut costs, Sony has farmed out PlayStation Portable production to non-Japanese manufacturers, mainly in China.
The unit measures 170 mm (6.7 inches) in length, 74 mm (2.9 inches) in width, and 23 mm (0.9 inches) in depth, and has a mass of 280 grams (a weight of 0.62 lb) including the battery. The Samsung (previously Sharp) branded TFT LCD screen measures 110 mm (4.3 in) diagonal with a 16:9 ratio and a 480×272 pixel resolution capable of 16.77 million colors. It has four possible brightness settings, the brightest of which is disabled in the older firmware versions unless on A/C power.
The PlayStation Portable’s main microprocessor is a multifunction device named “Allegrex” that includes a 32-bit MIPS32 R4k-based CPU, a Floating Point Unit, and a Vector Floating Point Unit. Additionally, there is a processor block known as “Media Engine” that contains another 32-bit MIPS32 R4k-base CPU, hardware for multimedia decoding (such as H.264), and a programmable DSP dubbed “Virtual Mobile Engine”. The secondary CPU present in the Media Engine is functionally equivalent to the primary CPU save for a lack of a VPU. The MIPS CPU cores are globally clocked between 1 and 333 MHz. During the 2005 GDC, Sony revealed that it had capped the PlayStation Portable’s CPU clock speed at 222 MHz for licensed software. Its reasons for doing so are unknown, but are the subject of some speculation. Various homebrew tools enable users to operate at 333 MHz, generally leading to a higher frame rate at the expense of battery life. On June 22, 2007, Sony Computer Entertainment confirmed that the latest firmware release, 3.50, does in fact remove this restriction and allows future games to run at the full 333 MHz speed. It does not affect already-released games.[16]
The system has 32 MiB main RAM and 4 MiB embedded DRAM. The 4 MiB of eDRAM consists of 2MiB dedicated to the Graphics Unit and 2MB dedicated to the Media Engine secondary processor. There is no memory management unit for either CPU. No evidence of a TLB has been found. The co processor that normally manages the TLB-based MMU seems to be a custom effort by Sony and has no integrated memory. Both CPUs contain 16KiB of two-way set associative instruction cache and data cache respectively. There is additionally 16KiB of scratchpad RAM which, while faster than main RAM, is not nearly as fast as the integrated cache.
The 166 MHz graphics chip has 2 MiB embedded memory and through its 512 bit interface provides hardware polygon and NURBS rendering, hardware directional lighting, clipping, environment projection and texture mapping, texture compression and tessellation, fogging, alpha blending, depth and stencil tests, vertex blending for morphing effects, and dithering, all in 16 or 24 bit color. The graphics chip also handles image output. Specifications state that the PlayStation Portable is capable of rendering 33 million flat-shaded polygons per second, with a 664 million pixel per second fill rate.
The PSP Slim & Light offers a 33% lighter and 5mm (19%) thinner system. Internal changes to achieve this include the removal of a metal chassis (used to reduce damage), improved WLAN modules and Micro-controller, and a thinner and much lighter LCD display.
Although dubbed “PSP Slim and Lite”, the PSP-2000 range offers a lot of other tweaks and improvements from the older generation. To target the original PSP generation’s poor load times when in UMD games, a “temporary memory” was implemented in order to speed up load times.
Further to this, the internal memory (RAM and FlashROM) was doubled to 64MB to improve load times and accommodate for an improvement in the web browser’s performance.
To make the PSP slimmer, the capacity of the battery was reduced by about 1/3. Due to more efficient power usage, the runtime of the PSP is still the same as the older model. Older model batteries will still work with the PSP Slim & Light which extends the amount of playing time on the PSP Slim & Light. However, the battery cover on the newer model does not fit over the older battery due to its bulkier size.
Amongst these, other minor changes were made. The PSP Slim & Light has a new enamel coated finish to prevent scratches and smudges. The serial port was also modified in order to accommodate a new video-out feature (while rendering older PSP remote controls incompatible). USB charging was made possible (using a USB cable to plug the PSP into a USB port to allow charging). The D-Pad was also modified in response to poor performance - being raised, while buttons offer improved responsiveness, confirmed in the GameSpot “hands-on” review: “several GameSpot editors have noticed that the d-pad and buttons on the new PSP provide a little more tactile feedback for a better overall feel.”.
A new UMD loading tray design was introduced to be more efficient in terms of size, while the Wi-Fi switch was moved to the top of the console and the Memory Stick slot moved to the upper left. The speakers were repositioned on the front of the PSP near the top of the screen. The rather obsoleted infra-red port was also removed - which offered no use to the original PSP generation other than in homebrew applications. The analog stick was also redesigned to be more flexible.
Information displayed on this page is taken from Wikipedia article about PSP. You can see the whole article here. To find more about content available for PSP or PSP itself, you can have a look at Sony PSP website.