Sony PSP

[Edgedamage]

From IGN's site
 
Sony entering any market must be an ominous thought for any competitor, even one with Nintendo's lock on the handheld game. Sony announced the PSP (PlayStation Portable) at last year's E3 and it immediately became one of the most anticipated pieces of gaming hardware for 2004.

The brains of the PSP come in the form of twin MIPS R4000 32 bit processors running at max 333MHz. One of these units is referred to as the Media Engine, and is to be used for sound, movies and I/O management. The system is expected to feature 8MB of main memory with a bandwidth of 2.6 Gigabytes per second along with 2MB of sub-memory for the Media Engine.

Outside of the CPU and main memory, the system will of course include a graphics processing unit (GPU). The GPU is made up of a Rendering Engine and a Surface Engine and has access to 2 Megabytes of VRAM with a bandwidth of 5.3 Gigabytes per second. The hardware will include support for traditional polygons as well as curved surface primitives along with such things as clipping, morphing and more, freeing up software from having to deal with these. Sony claims a theoretical polygon performance of 33 million polygons per second.

The system's UMD (Universal Media Disc) optical disk format has also been clarified a bit. A UMD is a 60 millimeter dual layered disk that can store up to 1.8 Gigabytes of data. Transfer rate for the reader unit is 11 Megabits per second, which is twice the transfer rate of a standard DVD system.

Multimedia support is big for the system. Sony announced MPEG4 support at E3, and now they've gotten a bit clearer, revealing that the PSP will use the AVC decoder, which has a high encoding rate. This will allow the UMD to store up to two hours of DVD quality video. Sound is also taking a high place on the system's feature list. The PSP will feature reconfigurable DSPs which can be rewritten allowing for support for the latest sound technology. Sony announced compatibility with the ATRAC3 plus format along with AAC and MP3. In addition, the system will support playback of 3D and 7.1 channel sound. On top of all this is Wireless LAN. The system will include as standard IEEE802.11 wireless LAN.

[shmokes]

I believe that Sony has recently caved to pressure from developers and the PSP will now have 32MB of RAM instead of 8.  I don't think Sony has confirmed it, but it is widely regarded as fact.

I think Nintendo is making a new handheld that will play the entire library of GBA games as well as Gamecube games.  This is the first time they've ever had a significant threat in the handheld market (I guess Gamegear might have been a tiny threat).  It looks like going with the 3" discs for Gamecube could pay off if they want their handheld to start out with a large and great library of games.

At any rate, it looks like for once the handheld market could get as interesting and competitive as the console market.

[Phoenix Smasher]

I think Nintendo is making a new handheld that will play the entire library of GBA games as well as Gamecube games.

Do you mean this thing?


It's a fake. The next handheld from Nintendo is called the Nintendo DS, or Dual Screen.

[Edgedamage]

Do you mean this thing?


It's a fake. The next handheld from Nintendo is called the Nintendo DS, or Dual Screen.

I wish the fake one was the real one. Or does DS mean dual system?

[shmokes]

That may well be fake, and the rumors could be bogus, but the DS is supposedly not the successor to the Gameboy Advance.  This is from an article on Gamespot:

The company also confirmed that a separate machine is being developed as a next-generation successor for the GBA. According to Nintendo's public relations chief Yasuhiro Minagawa, "The development of succeeding machines for the GBA and Game Cube are in the works, separately from the Nintendo DS."

The discs are small enough.  The only possible reason I can see for not including GC game support would be concerns with battery life (having to spin the disc all the time as opposed to some kind of flash memory or something).

I'll tell you one thing.  Whatever they do it'd better be pretty cool, cos that PSP looks pretty slick!