Emotion Engine

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Sony Emotion Engine CPU
Sony Emotion Engine CPU

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 the speed of a 733 MHz Pentium III and 15 times the speed of a 400 MHz Celeron at handling tasks like full-motion video (SIMD). [1]

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.

The chip is also used in early Playstation 3 units to achieve backwards compatibility and as shading/rasterization offload point for additional or post processing of complex PS3 specific games. PAL Playstation 3 units do not include an Emotion Engine as a matter of cost-saving, however this means such units must use less reliable software emulation to achieve some level of backwards compatibility. It is believed that eventually a hardware revision of NTSC units will remove the Emotion Engine chip in these territories.

Contents

Geometry

The execution units (the main core and both vector units) operate at the specified speed of ~300Mhz, and all three execution units can execute two instructions every cycle assuming no stalls occur.

The bus and peripheral interfaces operate at half the core speed.

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