PlayStation 2 technical specifications

Overview

Central processing unit

• CPU: MIPS III R5900-based "Emotion Engine", clocked at 294.912 MHz, with 128-bit SIMD capabilities
• 250-nm CMOS manufacturing, 13.5 million transistors, 225 mm² die size, 15 W dissipation
• * CPU core: MIPS R5900, 64-bit, little endian. CPU is a superscalar, in-order 2-issue design with 6-stage long integer pipelines, 32 32-bit GPR registers, 32 128-bit SIMD linear scalar registers, two 64-bit integer ALUs, 128-bit load-store unit and a branch execution unit.
• * Instruction set: MIPS III, MIPS IV subset with Sony's proprietary 107 vector SIMD multimedia instructions. The custom instruction set was implemented by grouping the two 64-bit integer ALUs.
• ** 32-bit FPU coprocessor with 6-stage long pipeline. FPU is not IEEE compliant.
• * 32-bit VLIW-SIMD vector units at 147.456 MHz: VPU0 and VPU1 each VPU contains a vector unit, instruction cache, data cache and interface unit. Each vector unit also has upper execution unit containing 4 × FMAC and lower execution unit containing FDIV, integer ALU, load-store unit, branch logic, 16 16-bit integer registers and 32 128-bit floating point registers. VPU1 has an additional EFU unit.
• ** VPU0 is tightly coupled with the main CPU and is typically used for polygon and geometry transformations, physics and other gameplay related tasks
• ** VPU1 operates independently controlled by microcode, parallel to the CPU core, is typically used for polygon and geometry transformations, clipping, culling, lighting and other visual based calculations
• *** Parallel: results of VU0/FPU sent as another display list via MFIFO
• *** Serial: results of VU0/FPU sent to VU1 and can act as an optional geometry pre-processor that does all base work to update the scene every frame
• * Image Processing Unit : MPEG-2 compressed image macroblock layer decoder allowing playback of DVDs and game FMV. It also allowed vector quantization for 2D graphics data.
• * Memory management unit, RDRAM controller and DMA controller: handle memory access within the system
• * Cache memory: 16 KB instruction cache, 8 KB + 16 KB scratchpad data cache
• * Scratchpad is extended area of memory visible to the EE CPU. This extended memory provides 16 kilobytes of fast RAM available to be used by the application. Scratchpad memory can be used to store temporary data that is waiting to be sent via DMA or for any other temporary storage that the programmer can define.

  Interfaces

• I/O processor interconnection: remote procedure call over a serial link, DMA controller for bulk transfer
• Main RDRAM memory bus. Bandwidth: 3.2 GB/s
• Graphics interface, DMA channel that connects the EE CPU to the GS co-processor. To draw something to the screen, one must send render commands to the GS via the GIF channel: 64-bit, 150 MHz bus, maximum theoretical bandwidth of 1.2 GB/s.
• Display lists generated by CPU/VPU0 and VPU1 are sent to the GIF, which prioritizes them before dispatching them to the Graphics Synthesizer for rendering.
• Vector Unit Interface, consists of two DMA channels VIF0 for VPU0 and VIF1 for VPU1. Vector units and the main CPU communicate via VIF DMA channels.
• SIF – Serial Interface or Subsystem Interface which consists of 3 DMA channels:
• Subsystem Interface 0 and Subsystem Interface 1, used for communication between the EE main CPU and IOP co-processor. These are serial DMA channels where both CPUs can send commands and establish communication through an RPC protocol.
• Subsystem Interface 2, used for backwards compatibility with PS1 games and debugging.

  Performance

• Floating point performance: 6.2 GFLOPS
• * FPU 0.64 GFLOPS
• * VU0 2.44 GFLOPS
• * VU1 3.08 GFLOPS
• Tri-strip geometric transformation : 150 million vertices per second
• * 3D CG geometric transformation with raw 3D perspective operations : 66–80+ million vertices per second
• * 3D CG geometric transformations at peak bones/movements/effects /lights : 15–20 million vertices per second
• * Lighting: 38 million polygons/second
• * Fog: 36 million polygons/second
• * Curved surface generation : 16 million polygons/second
• * Image processing performance: 150 million pixels/second
• * Actual real-world polygons : 500–650k at 30FPS, 250–325k at 60FPS
• Instructions per second: 6,000 MIPS

  System memory

• Main memory: 32 MB PC800 32-bit dual-channel RDRAM @ 400 MHz, 3.2 GB/s peak bandwidth

  Graphics processing unit

• Parallel rendering processor with embedded DRAM "Graphics Synthesizer" clocked at 147.456 MHz
• 279 mm² die
• Programmable CRT controller for output
• Pixel pipelines: 16 without any texture mapping units, however half of pixel pipelines can perform texturing, so fillrate is either 16 pixels per clock with untextured 2400 Mpixels; or 8 pixels per clock with 1200 megapixels with bilinear texturing, and 1200 megatexels.
• Video output resolution: Variable from 256×224 to 1920×1080
• 4 MB of embedded DRAM as video memory ; 48 gigabytes per second peak bandwidth
• * Texture buffer bandwidth: 9.6 GB/s
• * Frame buffer bandwidth: 38.4 GB/s
• eDRAM bus width: 2560-bit
• Pixel configuration: RGB:alpha, 24:8, 15:1; 16-, 24-, or 32-bit Z-buffer
• Display color depth: 32-bit
• Dedicated connection to main CPU and VU1
• Overall pixel fillrate: 16 × 147Mpix/s = 2.352 gigapixel/s
• * 1.2 gigapixel/s
• * With no texture, flat shaded: 2.4Gpix/s
• * With 1 full texture, Gouraud shaded: 1.2Gpix/s
• * With 2 full textures, Gouraud shaded: 0.6Gpix/s
• * Texture fillrate: 1.2 Gtexel/s
• * Sprite drawing rate: 18.75 million/s
• * Particle drawing rate: 150 million/s
• Polygon drawing rate: 75 million/s
• * 50 million/s
• * 30 million/s
• * 25 million/s
• * 16 million/s
• VESA
• * 3 rendering paths GS effects include: read-write textures, emboss bump mapping, Dot3 bump mapping, multiple-light sources, per-vertex lighting, volumetric fog, mipmapping, LOD, spherical harmonic lighting, high dynamic range rendering, motion blur, heat haze, bloom, depth of field, shadow volumes, shadow mapping, lightmapping, environment mapping, render-to-texture, alpha blending, alpha test, destination alpha test, depth test, scissor test, transparency effects, framebuffer effects, post-processing effects, perspective-correct texture mapping, edge-AAx2, bilinear, trilinear texture filtering, multi-pass, palletizing, NURBS, Bezier curves, Bezier surfaces, B-splines, offscreen drawing, framebuffer mask, flat shading, Gouraud shading, cel shading, dithering, texture swizzling.
• Multi-pass rendering ability
• * Four passes: 300 Mpixel/s

  Audio

• Audio: "SPU1+SPU2"
• * Sound Memory: 2 MB
• * Number of voices: 48 hardware channels of ADPCM on SPU2 plus software-mixed definable, programmable channels
• * Sampling Frequency: 44.1 kHz or 48 kHz
• * PCM audio source
• * Digital effects include:
• ** Pitch Modulation
• ** Envelope
• ** Looping
• ** Digital Reverb
• * Load up to 512K of sampled waveforms
• * Supports MIDI Instruments
• * Output: Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround sound, DTS, later games achieved analog 5.1 surround during gameplay through Dolby Pro Logic II

  I/O processor

• Input Output Processor
• * I/O Memory: 2 MB EDO DRAM
• * CPU Core: Original PlayStation CPU
• * Automatically underclocked to 33.8688 MHz to achieve hardware backwards compatibility with original PlayStation format games.
• * Sub Bus: 32-bit
• * Connection to: SPU and CD/DVD controller.

Connectivity

• 2 proprietary PlayStation controller ports
• 2 proprietary Memory Card slots using MagicGate encryption
• 2 USB 1.1 ports with an OHCI-compatible controller
• AV Multi Out, RGsB, YP_BP_R
• RFU DC Out
• S/PDIF Digital Out
• Expansion Bay for 3.5-inch HDD and Network Adaptor
• PC Card slot for Network Adaptor and External Hard Disk Drive
• Emotion Engine includes an on-chip Serial I/O port used internally by the EE's kernel to output debugging and messages and to start the kernel debugger.
• Ethernet port
• i.LINK
• Infrared remote control port

Optical disc drive

• Disc Drive type: proprietary interface through a custom micro-controller + DSP chip. 24x speed CD-ROM , 4x speed DVD-ROM — region-locked with copy protection.
• Supported Disc Media: PlayStation 2 format CD-ROM, PlayStation format CD-ROM, CD-DA, PlayStation 2 format DVD-ROM, DVD Video. DVD5 and DVD9 supported. Later models starting with SCPH-500xx are DVD+RW and DVD-RW compatible.