PlayStation2

The great debate

While developing the original PlayStation, Ken Kutaragi had a strong vision with few supporters. If not for his ambition and relentless pursuit of his dreams, the PlayStation would not have existed. Buoyed by his success in the original PlayStation, Ken Kutaragi brought the same ambition and avant-garde thinking to the PlayStation 2 development project.

In console development, there is always a trade-off between development-ease and performance-potential. Do you follow a traditional approach that will be easy for a developer to work with, or do you try something new and revolutionary even if it is more complicated?

In the last generation of consoles, one of the debates involved the storage medium. Traditional ROM cartridges are easy to work with and allow developers to instantly access game data, whereas CD-ROMs are trickier in that developers have the additional step of copying data from the CD to memory first, but offer benefits such as cheap media and the ability to use features such as FMV and speech. With the PS2, the debate concerned the rendering pipeline: "easy and traditional" vs. "fast but complicated." Sony chose the latter. The result is a fundamentally unique videogame platform.

Technical Specifications

Emotion Engine CPU @ 300 MHz
Extended MIPS III RISC instruction set
Three Independent Floating-Point Processors (1 FPU, and 2 vector units)
128-bit SIMD extensions
Dedicated MPEG-2 decoding block
40K total cache
10 DMA channels
15W
.18 micron manufacturing process
10.5 million transistors

Graphics Synthesizer @ 150 MHz
16 pixel pipeline
Untextured fill rate of 2.4 gigapixels/sec
Textured fill rate of 1.2 gigapixels/sec
4MB embedded DRAM
2560-bit memory bus (48GB/sec total bandwidth)
- Read 1024-bit
- Write 1024-bit
- Texture 512-bit
32-bit RGBA
32-bit Z-Buffer
Standard "OpenGL/Direct3D" Texture Blend Modes
.18 micron (currently shipping PS2 uses .25 micron)

I/O Processor @ 34 or 36 MHz
Complete Integration of the original PlayStation
2MB RAM
400Mbps IEEE 1394 (aka. i.Link, Firewire)
2 USB ports
2 Controller Ports
2 Memory Card Ports

SPU2+CPU Sound Chip
2MB RAM
16-bit, 48KHz maximum sampling rate

32 MB Direct Rambus DRAM (800MHz)
4X DVD-ROM (24X CD-ROM)
3.5" drive bay
Network upgradable

Accessories

Backward compatible with PlayStation peripherals
8MB MagicGate Memory Card
Dual Shock 2 Gamepad with full analog buttons
Compatible with USB mice, keyboards

With 3 floating point processors on the Emotion Engine, a 2560-bit memory bus on the Graphics Synthesizer, and the integration of the entire PlayStation into the I/O Processor, there is a lot to talk about. Let's get started.