Sony Corp yesterday revealed that LSI Logic Corp is the chip beneficiary of its ambitious plans to enter the games player market. Sony Computer Entertainment unveiled the CPU for its planned PlayStation CD-based home video game system, which it calls the PlayStation CPU. Sony credits the 0.5-micron silicon process and proprietary LSI Logic CoreWare approach to system-level design methodology for the claimed superiority of the chip. It is based on a 32-bit R-series RISC microprocessor core, but also integrates geometric graphics using a Sony-developed three-dimensional geometry engine, and high-resolution full-motion video from the MDEC decompression subsystem based on JPEG technology. Sony reckons the chip delivers 200 MIPS, and that aggregating the performance of the support processors means the PlayStation will deliver over 500 MIPS. The graphics engine is said to be capable of drawing up to 360,000 polygons a second.
