Architecture of the Playstation 2

Post by rusk » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 9:01 AM UTC

wildbunny wrote: post #47

rusk wrote: post #38

I ran across an interesting factoid a while back where a line was drawn between the Amiga CD32 and PS2 - that somehow Sony picked up where Commodore left off but I’ve been unable to find a reference since and I’m certain at this stage I’ve got the names and dates mixed up ... anyone heard anything like this?

I suppose you might argue that the amiga paved the way for the architecture of the PS2 - the copper chip ran a rudimentary display list, the blitter hardware accelerated graphics operations. But I wouldn't say there is a direct relationship... wait you're not talking about the CDTV, are you?

Post by scudd » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 8:14 PM UTC

paulmd wrote: post #23

rektide wrote: post #21

Edit: why am I talking about the PS3 cell? This article is about the PS2. :facepalm: please ignore, too late to delete? Unmentioned is perhaps the coolest fact, about how it all went down: The leading lady of chip design Lisa Su (presently President & CEO of AMD) parlayed her existing chip-design experience first doing Silicon-on-Insulator research at MIT, then spending some years fixing some copper interconnect emer…

Cell was a disappointment in the PS3 though. It was such an underperformer that the SPEs couldn’t be used for their intended role as a GPU and got shanghied into being used like SMT cores, while a whole separate GPU chip had to be added into the design at the last minute to compensate. The Cell’s weak CPU performance, strange programming model, and weak developer tooling was a problem for pretty much the whole genera…

Post by rasz » Fri, Feb 26, 2021, 7:57 AM UTC

rusk wrote: post #51

wildbunny wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose you might argue that the amiga paved the way for the architecture of the PS2 - the copper chip ran a rudimentary display list, the blitter hardware accelerated graphics operations. But I wouldn't say there is a direct relationship... wait you're not talking about the CDTV, are you?

Maybe it was blitter etc Nope not CDTV, CD32 was a later project and really quite good but C= couldn’t sustain it. The story I think I heard was that the similarity in the controllers was some sort of homage. Maybe it was PS1 rather than PS2 ... thinking about the timeline that all lines up, and Sony would have been looking for a jumping in point rather than starting from scratch after being burnt by Nintendo.

Post by danbolt » Fri, Feb 26, 2021, 9:44 PM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #54

danbolt wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that the bass assembler, or something else? I've been playing around with the default assembler setup in libdragon, but I'd be curious about trying something more intuitive.

It's an assembler I'm writing as a Rust proc_macro. Lets you do fun stuff like share constants between Rust running on the main CPU and the RSP, and handles some runtime code generation pretty nicely

Post by rusk » Mon, Mar 01, 2021, 9:34 AM UTC

rasz wrote: post #55

rusk wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it was blitter etc Nope not CDTV, CD32 was a later project and really quite good but C= couldn’t sustain it. The story I think I heard was that the similarity in the controllers was some sort of homage. Maybe it was PS1 rather than PS2 ... thinking about the timeline that all lines up, and Sony would have been looking for a jumping in point rather than starting from scratch after being burnt by Nintendo.

>CD32 was a later project and really quite good CD32 was a repackaged Amiga 1200. It was the worst fifth generation game system. It featured such gems as Wing Commander running at 1 frame per second.