Newsgroup: it.comp.console.playstation
Titolo: PLAYSTATION 2 - CONFERMATA !!!


Oggetto: PLAYSTATION 2 !!!
Data: mercoledì 17 febbraio 1999 19.06
              PlayStation 2: Confirmed 55 Million Polys/Sec.
                                Today at the IEEE International Solid-State
Circuits Conference, Sony Computer Entertainment R&D unveiled the guts of
what will be the PlayStation 2.
                                February 16, 1999
                                The house was packed with representatives
from game companies (including EA, Dreamworks Interactive and 3DO) and
engineers from companies like NEC, Intel, Fujitsu and Toshiba. The topic was
"A Microprocessor with 128b CPU, 10 Floating-Point MACs, 4 Floating-Point
Dividers, and MPEG2 Decoder. The presenter was Masakazu Suzuoki, a Director
at Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.
                                The stage was set for a dry tech lecture on
yet another microprocessor pushing some boundary or another. For example,
the same conference also featured a chip with the highest transistor count
yet achieved. But this was not a lecture on some inaccessible data
architecture. This was the heart of the PlayStation 2 (though Sony has
neither confirmed nor denied that fact).
                                According to the presentation, the central
processor for the new system will be fully 128-bit. That's external bus and
internal pathways. The system has three parallel processors: a CPU, which
runs at 250MHz and has a floating-point coprocessor (called the FPU), and
two floating-point vector units (which are referred to as VU0 and VU1 by the
engineers who designed the system).
                                The goals in designing the system were to
create a future entertainment machine. As the Mr. Suzuoki put it in his
presentation, games saw pre-calculated image and sound in 1985, then
realtime synthesized sound in 1989, then realtime synthesized geometry in
1994. So the future game machine would provide behavior synthesis, allowing
for the autonomous behavior of objects, physical simulation, and environment
synthesis. The new game machine would also provide realistic geometry with
complex geometry translation and complex surface models. Finally, the game
machine of the future would allow for high-resolution images.
                                Towards these goals, the Sony engineers have
been working with Toshiba since 1996 on a microprocessor that performs
parallel "behavior synthesis" and geometry, with both relying on floating
point operations. To make this possible, the system features more
floating-point operations than any processor yet designed -- a whopping
total of five billion floating-point operations a second. This coupled with
the CPU's 365 Dhrystone 2.1 Million Instructions Per second (MIPs), or 500
MIPs with compiler optimization leads to some astonishing geometrical
achievements.
                                Both the VU0 and the VU1 serve highly
specific functions in this microprocessor. While each is structurally
similar, both serve entirely different needs. The VU0 is used primarily to
power the "behavior synthesis" of the machine, using its high powered
floating point ability to calculate complicated physics simulations for
believable 3D worlds. The VU1 is just like the VU0, with the exception of an
added EFU (Elementary Function Unit) which performs elementary function
calculations required for geometry operations.
                                According to Sony, the new architecture,
when using all three processors in parallel function, can calculate 55
million polygons per second. That's without effects. With parallel lighting,
the system can calculate 34 million polys/sec. With lighting and fog, it's
30 million/sec. Finally, with lighting, fog and bezier curves the system can
calculate 13 million polys/second. Bezier curves are the kind of calculated
curved surfaces that John Carmack is using for Quake III (see this month's
issue of Next Generation Magazine for more). In comparison, Voodoo3 boasts 8
million in its highest end iteration and has no hardware support for bezier
curves. The Dreamcast and all older game consoles render even fewer polygons
than that.
                                However, the presentation did not include
any information on the system's graphics rendering engine (or sound, for
that matter). So while these polygons are calculated by the processor
discussed in the paper, it's unclear how quickly the system will be able to
render the polygons to the screen. To give an idea of the limitations of
television, at 640x480, rendering 60fps, with one polygon per pixel on the
screen, the highest number of polygons a TV could display in a second is
18.4 million. That means that the system will be dedicating much of its
floating-point brawn to "behavior synthesis," and advanced graphic effects.
                                In addition to the sheer floating-point and
poly-pushing power of the system, it also features special texture
compression. Textures will be stored in a compressed format and then
decompressed on demand to various resolutions.
                                Another impressive feature of the
architecture is that it decodes MPEG2 footage with only half of its
processor power, enabling what the Sony engineers called "special effects
using MPEG2 footage." For instance, it is possible that we might see
polygonal objects with MPEG2 quality textures.
                                The question that remains is whether this
architecture will appear in the new PlayStation. As NGO has reported, one of
the authors of the paper presented today is Ken Kuturagi, the father of the
PlayStation. While Sony has not confirmed that this, his newest brainchild,
is the PlayStation 2, it has adopted the technology and dubbed it the
"Emotion Engine."
                                In a Sony release today, the company called
the Emotion Engine "one of the results of extensive research and development
conducted by Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. to realize the performance
characteristics required for future computer entertainment applications."
While Sony danced around the issue, the cat was let out of the bag by the
ISSCC conference itself, which issued a press release on the chip saying it
"will establish the performance of the newest Sony PlayStation."
                                When questioned at the conference whether
this processor would appear in the new PlayStation, Mr. Suzuoki said "I
cannot comment for business issues." It received a warm laugh from the
crowd, but everyone knew the truth. This is the next generation of Sony's
PlayStation technology, and with word on its graphics renderer still to
come, it looks like a looming giant.
                         Final Fantasy VIII Tops 2 Million
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