Samsung to Manufacture PS Vita SoC

by Andrew Cunningham on 7/29/2011 4:55 PM EST
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  • fishman - Friday, July 29, 2011 - link

    The PS2 used a MIPS R3000 processor - not proprietary.
  • chick0n - Friday, July 29, 2011 - link

    Are you serious? Do you even know what you're talking about ?

    R3000 is from PS1 aka Original Playstation.

    PS2 uses Emotion Engine.

    *sigh* if u don't know something, might as well stfu ?
  • chinedooo - Friday, July 29, 2011 - link

    relax
  • michael2k - Friday, July 29, 2011 - link

    Those unique bits of silicon kinda do make them proprietary, in the same manner that the SPEs in the PS3 doe, even if the SPEs are really dumbed down PPC cores (also seen in the XBox 360).

    In this sense, the VPUs are owned by Sony, making them proprietary, and the SPEs belong to IBM, making them proprietary.

    On the flip, ARM NEON and THUMB and similar performance enhancing instruction sets are open and anyone can implement them, making them non proprietary.
  • SunLord - Sunday, July 31, 2011 - link

    What are you talking about? What VPU0 and VPU1? I don't see any mention of them on the Vita... The Vita is Quad core A9 with a Quad core SGX543 in theory it has 2x the processing a power of a Ipad2...
  • Wolfpup - Friday, November 11, 2011 - link

    They're talking about the Playstation 2, not Vita.

    I wish Anandtech or some other serious hardware site would do an in depth look at the tech used here. Both for Vita specifically, and for the A9, and SGX543.

    On paper, I don't understand why an A9 isn't comparable to say a Pentium 3...on paper it seems like it would be, but...
  • FaaR - Monday, August 1, 2011 - link

    Cell SPEs aren't dumbed down (or otherwise) PPC cores, they're completely custom jobbies that are quite advanced and feature-complete, they're not code compatible with PowerPC or Power microarchitectures at all, nor MIPS, nor anything else either for that matter.
  • Hrel - Saturday, July 30, 2011 - link

    Now if only someone could convince Sony to ship it with Android. They could make their own applet to run their stuff in. But I want Android on it dangit!
  • Solidstate89 - Saturday, July 30, 2011 - link

    I thought for sure, given the fact they were touting a Quad-core with all that graphic prowess that they would be using that Marvell SoC that they were bragging about not too long ago.
  • SunLord - Sunday, July 31, 2011 - link

    The chips used in the psp and ps3 aren't proprietary... The psp uses two MIPS s32 r4k sips chips and a dsp with a fancy marketing names its about as proprietary as an ARM A9 made by Samsung is compared to the one from TI or Nvdia. The PS3 uses a Cell cpu which you can buy from IBM and a custom ati chip which is semi-proprietary I guess.
  • FaaR - Monday, August 1, 2011 - link

    Custom Nvidia chip, but I assume that's what you meant. :)

    Afair, it's a 9800GT or somesuch (I swear, those things were re-badged like a million times so who can keep track?) with marginal tweaks to its pixel shaders, added HDMI audio support and Rambus Redwood I/O links to the Cell processor instead of PCI Express.
  • SquattingDog - Monday, August 1, 2011 - link

    Sorry to necro-post this, but I just saw this article.

    @ FaaR, I think you mean 7800/7850/7900/7950GT in the PS3 - WAAYY below 9800GT spec. The Xbox 360 uses a custom ATi chip which was basically equivalent in performance to the x1900XT/x1950XT.

    It is because consoles are using such outdated graphics processors, that they are unfortunately holding back graphics for many PC games (look how many ports we are getting with average dx9-era graphics, heck even Crysis 2 has rubbish graphics anywhere but on the linear storyline path not to mention reflections/shadows...) - and with so many people buying up consoles and console games, it seems the PC gaming market is on the decline, and has been for some time.

    Have read some rumours stating that Sony and Microsoft are holding off on releasing their next gen consoles, as the current ones, including games and accessories are still selling so well. Kinect anyone?

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