March 1 said:

PlayStation 2 Cometh

After all the talk and speculation about the future of Sony's next console,
Sony may be getting ready to unleash a gaming tsunami of epic proportions
tomorrow when the company is expected to reveal new PlayStation 2
information at a developer's conference in Tokyo. It will be a full house
packed with journalists and developers from around the world - and hopefully
the show won't disappoint.

The Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported in its Monday morning edition that Sony
will introduce a new video game machine (reportedly called "PlayStation 2")
before March 2000 featuring the Emotion Engine processor codeveloped by
Toshiba and SCEI. Additionally, the machine will be able to play DVD movies.
According to the report, even though it will be several times more powerful
than Intel's Pentium III, it will cost less than a PC (which runs about
100,000 yen in Japan - about US$840). Because the new console will use DVD
as its delivery format, it will increase data capacity per disc by seven to
eight times to just under 5 gigabytes.

Development of the Emotion Engine chip has cost Sony and Toshiba nearly 10
billion yen ($84 million) and is not just a move to become the dominant
force in the video game market, but possibly to take over Intel and
Microsoft's hold on the microchip market. A Sony executive, as quoted by the
paper, said, "We take aim at the stranglehold on the chip/operating system
market enjoyed by the Intel-Microsoft alliance." He went on to say that the
major wars in the technology market will be fought over entertainment
applications, not over business-related applications.

The article goes on to hype the system's capabilities, saying that it will
be able to produce images with the quality of Disney/Pixar's Toy Story
(remember when Nintendo said the N64 would have Jurassic Park and T2-quality
effects when the Project Reality was first announced?), and that it will be
able to handle 50 times more 3D data than the Dreamcast.

By Chris Johnston, videogames.com

Click to expand...

Nov 10 said:

TOKYO - A report from Nikkei Electronics Wire
says that Sony and Toshiba are working together
on developing a chipset for Sony's next console,
the PlayStation 2. Nikkei says that SCEI is
planning to officially announce the PlayStation 2 to
Japanese gamers later this month and predicts
that the PS2 could be available by the end of next
year. The chipset itself is set to be introduced at
the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits
Conference next February (an expo for chip
makers).

Composed of two chips, the chipset is made up of
a Digital Signal Processor (DSP) and a new
RISC-based (Reduced Instruction Set Computer)
processor. These two chips are believed to be for
the PS2, although at this time there has been no
official announcement regarding Sony's next
machine.

The 10,500,000 transistor, 250 MHz DSP will
combine 14 accumulators for floating point
calculations that will help in the math processing of
rich 3D graphics. Another rumor has suggested
that Sony's PS2 will use a more advanced form of
3D graphics called NURBS thus dropping the
current method of creating 3D graphics though
polygons. Additionally, the DSP will also contain a
hardware MPEG-2 decoder. You may already
know MPEG-2 decoders as the chips that decode
DVD movies for your TV or PC. If this report is
true, gamers may be able to watch new DVD
movies on their TVs.

NURBS (or Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline) is a
technique that allows developers to specify 3D
surfaces on object in an environment. Currently,
gamers have only seen the use of this technology
when viewing 3D automobile models on television.
Characters in games could look as good as they
do in Toy Story.

Also running at 250MHz, the RISC
microprocessor, using MIPS architecture, will be
two-way super scaler, with more than 100 new
multimedia extensions. Internally, the RISC chip will
combine an 8K data cache, a 16K command
cache, and 16K of internal RAM.

In comparison, the 64-bit RISC-based SH-4 that
powers the Sega Dreamcast, runs at 200 MHz. No
word yet on what bit depth the new Sony/Toshiba
chip will run at but we can safely assume it runs at
64-bit.

By Yutaka Ohbuchi & Micheal Mullen

Click to expand...

March 2 said:

TOKYO, March 2, 1999 -- Sony Computer Entertainment has developed the Graphics Synthesizer for the next generation PlayStation® incorporating a massively parallel rendering engine that contains a 2,560 bit wide data bus that is 20 times the size of leading PC-based graphics accelerators. Very high pixel fill rates and drawing performance is achieved only through the use of embedded DRAM process technology pioneered by SCE for use in advanced graphics technology.

The current PlayStation introduced the concept of the Graphics Synthesizer via the real-time calculation and rendering of a 3D object. This new GS rendering processor is the ultimate incarnation of this concept – delivering unrivalled graphics performance and capability. The rendering function was enhanced to generate image data that supports NTSC/PAL Television, High Definition Digital TV and VESA output standards. The quality of the resulting screen image is comparable to movie-quality 3D graphics in real time.

In the design of graphics systems, the rendering capability is defined by the memory bandwidth between the pixel engine and the video memory. Conventional systems use external VRAM reached via an off-chip bus that limits the total performance of the system. However in the case of the new GS, there is a 48-Gigabyte memory access bandwidth achieved via the integration of the pixel logic and the video memory on a single high performance chip. This allows orders of magnitude greater pixel fill-rate performance compared to today’s best PC-based graphics accelerators.

When rendering small polygons, the peak drawing capacity is 75 Million polygons per second and the system can render 150 Million particles per second. With this large drawing capability, it is possible to render a movie-quality image. With Z-buffering, textures, lighting and alpha blending (transparency), a sustained rate of 20 Million polygons per second can be drawn continuously.

This new architecture can also execute recursive multi-pass rendering processing and filter operations at a very fast speed without the assistance of the main CPU or main bus access. In the past, this level of real-time performance was only achieved when using very expensive, high performance, dedicated graphics workstations. However, with the design of the new Graphics Synthesizer, this high quality image is now available for in-home computer entertainment applications. This will help accelerate the convergence of movies, music and computer technology into a new form of digital entertainment.

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Striek said:

Yes, we already knew this.
Press = created PS2 toy story stigma.
Microsoft = created Xbox toy story stigma.

Click to expand...