Sony PSP - codenamed NGP

Sony have given everyone a look of their upcoming PSP. They recently announced the jaw-dropping hardware configuration of the upcoming Sony PSP.

The new Sony product will sport an ARM processor. However, it is significantly more powerful than anything else on the market right now. They are using the Cortex A9 core,  quad core processor. Yes you read that right, "Quad Core". They are also using the SGX543MP4+ graphics processing unit from Imagination Technologies, which also is a quad core design. This handheld device is going to be more powerful than a lot of budget - full grown desktop PCs.

Comparatively, Sony are going to be releasing a gaming device with four times the CPU and GPU power of the iPhone 4. With so much power under the hood, heat and the heavy battery drain are going to be a problem. Lets see how Sony tackles this little obstacle. Linley Gwennap, an analyst with the Linley Group said “There are a couple of issues. One is the heat coming out of it. And the other is battery life,” Gwennap said. “Putting it in a tablet or smartphone, you might dial up a Web page, fire up the four cores, get the thing rendered, then shut them (the four cores) down again. “In a game environment, it’s going to be interesting to see how they manage that. When you’re playing a game you just don’t start and stop. So, they need to figure out a way to keep those four cores running without generating too much heat and without draining the battery. But you can always turn something on, turn something off. It depends on the needs of that particular game.”

Not only has the new Imagination SGX543 GPU got four cores, but it also has twice the shader throughput which should make games much more feature rich. Each of the cores has multiple shader pipelines. Each core has multiple shader pipelines. The 535 which Intel used originally in their Atom processor has two shader pipelines. The Samsung Galaxy S which uses a SGX540, it has four shader pipelines. This PSP is expected to be around 8x more powerful than the Samsung Galaxy S.

At this rate, very soon we may see the all venerable "old faithful" PC take a back seat to very powerful mobile computing.  I love what is going on lately in the technology world. Seeing this only two words come to mind at the moment, "Insanely Expensive"!