Emotion Engine

The Emotion Engine is the name of the Central Processing Unit (CPU) used in Sony PlayStation 2 video game consoles. It was jointly designed by Toshiba and Sony and began mass production in 1999. According to MicroDesign Resources , it is two times faster than a 733 MHz Pentium III and 15 times faster than a 400 MHz Celeron at handling tasks like full-motion video.

The Emotion Engine's data bus, cache memory as well as all registers are implemented in 128 bit technology, integrated on a single 0.18 micrometer process technology chip (making it the first commercial 128 bit CPU). The Emotion Engine, based on the MIPS R5900, is sort of a combination CPU and DSP processor, whose main function is simulating 3D worlds. It integrated all necessary units on the die: The MIPS III CPU core, 2 vector units, FPU, image processing unit (basically an MPEG2 decoder with some other capabilities), 10-channel DMA controller, graphics interface unit, RDRAM and I/O interfaces, all connected via a shared 128-bit internal bus.

Specifications

• CPU core: 128-bit RISC (MIPS IV-subset)
• Clock Frequency: 294 MHz (299 MHz in later versions)
• Gate width: 0.18 µm
• VDD Voltage: 1.8 V
• Power consumption: 15 W
• Metal layers: 4
• Total transistors: 10.5 million
• Die size: 240 mm²
• Package: 540 pin PBGA
• Integer Unit: 64-bit (2-way Superscalar)
• Multimedia extended instructions: 107 instructions at 128 bit width
• Integer General Purpose Register: 32 at 128 bit width
• TLB: 48 double entries
• Instruction Cache: 16 KB (2 way)
• Data Cache: 8 KB (2 way)
• Scratch pad RAM: 16 KB (Dual port)
• Main Memory: 32 MB (Direct RDRAM 2 channels at 800 MHz)
• Memory bandwidth: 3.2 GB/s
• DMA: 10 channels
• Co-processor 1: FPU (FMAC x 1, FDIV x 1)
• Co-processor 2: VU0 (FMAC x 4, FDIV x 1)
• Vector Processing Unit: VU1 (FMAC x 5, FDIV x 2)
• Floating Point Performance: 6.2 GFLOPS
• Curved Surface Generation (Bezier): 16 million polygons per second
• Image Processing Unit: MPEG2 Macroblock Layer Decoder
• Image Processing Performance: 150 million pixels per second

Geometry

• Perspective Transformation: 66 million polygons per second
• Lighting: 38 million polygons per second
• Fog: 36 million polygons per second

See also

• PlayStation 2
• Graphics processing unit
• Computer graphics
• List of computer graphics and descriptive geometry topics

External links

• Sound and Vision: A Technical Overview of the Emotion Engine
• The PlayStation2 vs. the PC: a system-level comparison of two 3D platforms
• Scientific Computing on the Sony PlayStation 2
• BBC article: PlayStation turns supercomputer