Sony’s Emotionally Charged Chip

While Intel and the PC industry stumble around in search of some need for the processing power they already have, Sony has been busy trying to figure out how to get more of it—lots more. The company has apparently succeeded: at the recent International Solid-State Circuits Conference (see MPR 4/19/99, p. 20), Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) and Toshiba described a multimedia processor that will be the heart of the next-generation PlayStation, which—lacking an official name—we refer to as PlayStation 2000, or PSX2. Called the Emotion Engine (EE), the new chip upsets the traditional notion of a game processor. Whereas game CPUs have typically been cheap and wimpy compared with those in PCs, the EE is neither. At a whopping 240 mm2 in a 0.25-micron process, the 10.5-million-transistor chip will cost more than $100 to manufacture, according to our cost model. Never mind the companion 279-mm2 rendering chip, called the graphics synthesizer (GS), or the I/O processor (IOP), which includes a complete first-generation PlayStation CPU for backward compatibility, as Figure 1 shows. The EE and GS die sizes are frightening; vendors of PC processors break out in a cold sweat at the mere thought of a die larger than about 180 mm2. How Toshiba and SCE intend to build two chips larger than that for a consumer game console is unclear. But the companies are intent on doing so; two large fabs are now being readied for just this purpose. While the EE is not cheap, neither is it wimpy. The 300-MHz part packs a floating-point punch of 6.2 GFLOPS, three times that of Intel’s top-of-the-line 500-MHz Pentium III with SSE (see MPR 3/8/99, p. 1) and 15 times that of a Celeron-400 (which lacks SSE). With the EE pumping out 75 million polygons per second and the GS drawing polygons at 2.4 billion pixels per second, the PlayStation 2000 will bring Toy Story–like realism to home games, says SCE.