Play Station

PlayStation is a video game system made by Sony. The current incarnation is the Playstation4 which has enough processing power to get tangled up in Japanese "computational weapon systems" exportation license issues.

Features:

• 128-bit architecture at 300MHz
• memory bus bandwidth 3.2GB/sec
• 6.2 gigaflop FPU

Of course, these numbers are mostly meaningless (and or inaccurate). What does 128bit architecture mean? The CPUs are derived from R3000s which are 32bit chips. And which FPU or is that number for the whole system (in which case we should say a 6.2glop machine rather than FPU).

So, some more useful notes about the machine. It has 3 main CPUs. 2 run at 300mhz. One of them (the IO processor) runs at 36mhz. All 3 CPUs are derived from the r3000. The faster two have extensive modifications for vector processing. Unlike other systems, you don't just throw a list of polygons to the 3d accelerator, you have to write your own. This isn't so bad though, thanks to the special vector units.

I can't wait until people manage to bypass the copy protection system so that we can start hacking out our own PS2 programs. I rather think that this machine could make a decent low cost PC. It definitely would make a good mp3 player. Just add a USB ethernet adapter.

Sony now sells a Linux kit for the PS2. It has a 40G hard drive and an ethernet adapter. You can do almost anything a normal linux box can do, plus you have some access to the custom hardware like the vector units and the game controllers. The people I know who have bought the kit are quite impressed by it -- Edouard