Specifications for the rumored PSP2 that Sony is allegedly working on may have been leaked and could possibly indicate that the system will be built around a low-power quad core chip codenamed Hydra.
Eurogamer.es (Google translation) claims to have gained access to “internal information” about the next generation of PSP that Sony reportedly has in development but hasn’t yet announced. This is not the PSP Go, which we already know about, but an entirely new unit which will be as powerful as an original Xbox.
The source of all that power will be Hydra, a quad core version of Imagination Technologies’ SGX543MP, described as very much like the one found in the iPhone 3GS as well as a number of netbooks such as the Dell Mini 12. According to the report, the processor will achieve 133 million polygons per second with a fillrate of four gigapixels per second, with an additional boost provided by PowerVR’s tile-based deferred rendering.
I have no idea what any of that means but apparently it’s pretty hot stuff. The single core version of the SGX chip was demonstrated at CES running Quake 3 Arena at over 30 frames per second and Imagination Technologies describes it as a GP-GPU, meaning it can handle both CPU and GPU duties. “It may well be that PSP2 will centralize all of its processing into a single chip, thus saving power and providing other efficiency savings from a programming perspective (lightning fast interaction between game logic and graphics, for example),” Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry blog noted.
It’s impossible at this stage to confirm the veracity of the rumor but Digital Foundry also said that the information it has about Eurogamer’s source, coupled with ongoing rumors that Sony licensed a “high-performance graphics core” from Imagination Technologies in November 2008, leads it to consider the story “a likely proposition.” Sony has refused to comment but Eurogamer predicts that an official announcement should be forthcoming by the end of the year.
