Sony PlayStation 2

Sony PlayStation 2 - Revealed

Mmmmmmm... Power!

The Playstation 2 is a new breed of machine. Rather than being simply a "games console" this machine is a 'Computer Entertainment System' which promises to blur the boundaries between music, films and games.

For all you techies out there, here are the specifications of Playstation 2:

    CPU: 128 BIT "Emotion Engine" - A superbly powerful graphics engine capable of producing near to life effects.
    System Clock: 300 MHz - Equal in power to a Pentium II 300Mhz machine
    System Memory: 32 MB Direct Rambus - We would have preferred 64, but who's arguing...
    Memory Bus Bandwidth: 3.2 GB per second - Shows how much data can be transferred between memory and CPU per second
    Co-Processor: FPU (Floating Point Multiply Accumulator x 1, Floating Point Divider x 1) - A powerful workhorse
    Vector Units: VU0 and VU1 (Floating Point Multiply Accumulator x 9, Floating Point Divider x 1) - A fast system for manipulating 3D objects in realtime - ish
    Floating Point Performance: 6.2 GFLOPS - Means the machine can perform 6.2billion calculations per second
    3D CG Geometric Transformation: 66 Million Polygons Per Second - Doubtful.. probably nearer 20 million
    Compressed Image Decoder: MPEG2 - lets the machine handle full motion video easily
    Clock Frequency: 150MHz - The most powerful PC Graphics card to date only works at 110Mhz
    Number of voices: ADPCM: 48 channel on SPU2 plus definable by software Sampling Frequency. - Equal if not better than CD Quality.
    Interface Types: IEEE1394, Universal Serial Bus (USB) - All the latest methods of connecting peroipherals to your machine
    Communication via PC-Card PCMCIA - Hopefully this means network cards and modems galore
    Disc Media: DVD-ROM (CD-ROM compatible) - The ideal format since each DVD can hold ~1.2Gb of data, this allows for larger more complex games

As you can see, playstation 2 certainly has impressive specifications. The expansion slots and DVD drive even let you use it as a home cinema system.

The system is fully backward compatible with old playstation games and controllers ( though new controllers will be brought out for this machine ).