Hi,
The Emotion Engine is a 128-bit RISC processor, running at 300 MHz.
The amount of transistors on the processor is over 13 million. Its
floating point performance is 6.2 GFLOPS. It needs a high floating
point performance because of the complex 3D calculations it needs to
do. The processor is capable of displaying 66 million polygons/second.
That is without effects on though. With these effects - Lighting
added, it's capable of displaying 38 million polygons/second, - fog
added, 36 million polygons/second. - Bezier curves added, 16 million
polygons/second. Bezier curves make edges smooth and curvy on objects
which need them to be like that, for example a round table.
The Emotion Engine consists of two main parts, that is one part which
takes care of the physics calculations, AI, and so on. The other part
takes care of the geometry processing. The first part consists of a
MIPS III CPU core, a vector unit V0 and a floating point coprocessor
FPU.
The second part consists of another vector unit, V1 and also a
graphics interface unit, GIF. Then the other parts on the processor
are an I/O interface which is connected to the I/O processor, RDRAM
interface which is connected to the Playstation 2's two RDRAM banks,
an Image Processing Unit which is an MPEG2 decoder, and a 10-channel
DMA controller. All components integrated into one die, and are
connected via a shared 128-bit internal bus, except for the FPU, which
is connected to the MIPS III CPU core using a 128-bit coprocessor bus,
so they don't have to communicate through the shared bus.
The same thing goes for the V0 vector unit processor. It is also
directly connected to the MIPS III CPU core with a 128-bit coprocessor
bus. The V1 and the GIF are also connected via a bus like that too, in
addition to the shared 128-bit internal bus. Now let's take a look at
the things which are interesting on the Emotion Engine, that is the
MIPS III, and the vector units. The MIPS III CPU core The MIPS ISA is
an industry standard RISC ISA that can be found in many different
kinds of applications like printers and scanners.
The MIPS III which is found in the Emotion Engine is an implementation
which supports multimedia instruction set enchantments. It has 32
128-bit General Purpose Registers, and also these logical pipes: - two
64-bit integer ALUs - a 128-bit load/store unit - a branch execution
unit - FPU coprocessor - Vector coprocessor The CPU has a 16K
instruction cache and 8K data cache. And it's pipeline is in 6 stages,
that is: - PC select - Instruction fetch - Instruction decode and
register read - Execute - Cache access - Writeback The pipeline is a
normal RISC pipeline.
The Emotion Engine, which is the core of the Playstation 2 console is
a highly original piece of microprocessor, which is also very
powerful. Programmers who develop games for the machine have been
complaining about that it's difficult to program, but I guess it's
more a matter of getting used to a different way of thinking. But once
programmers get used to the Emotion Engine, they can be creating very
beautiful-looking games because the processor is very powerful when it
comes to 3D graphics. There is no doubt that the processor is very
good at handling 3D graphics, after all that's what it's constructed
for. With curved surfaces it can show up to 16 million polygons/second
and that's a highly impressive number, at least it was in 1999 when
the Emotion Engine was revealed.
linux.oreillynet.com: Opening Up the PlayStation 2 with Linux
http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2002/03/21/linuxps2.html
While Linux has been brought to other consoles (such as the SEGA
Dreamcast) by hobbyist programmers in the Linux community, this is the
first distribution officially released, sold, and supported by a major
hardware manufacturer for its game console. Since the demonstration of
the kit in January this year at LinuxWorld, over four thousand people
have registered at the Linux for PlayStation 2 Community Web site. The
site offers discussion forums and file space to help Linux PS2
developers coordinate with one another on projects.
Game Developers
MobyGames
http://ps2.mobygames.com/
You can click on any game developer you see
to retrieve the list of games that developer has worked on.
Links for Much More information
PlayStation 2 Developer Network
http://www.devnet.scea.com/
SCEA Research and Development
http://www.devnet.scea.com/research/
Sound and Vision: A Technical Overview of the Emotion Engine
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/1q00/playstation2/ee-1.html
NDK
http://www.snsys.com/Products/ProductSheets/NDKPS2-E-headed.pdf
IGN Chats About Summoner
http://ps2.ign.com/articles/080/080208p1.html
Renderware
http://www.renderware.com/
LithTech Engine
http://ps2.ign.com/articles/090/090174p1.htmly
Game Spy - LithTech Interview
http://www.gamespy.com/legacy/interviews/lithtech2.shtm
Linux for PlayStation 2
http://playstation2-linux.com/
http://playstation2-linux.com/softwaremap/megatree.php?trove_cat_id=346&selected_trove=283
CodePlay
http://www.codeplay.com/index.html
xRhino
http://www.xrhino.com
TransGaming Technologies
http://www.transgaming.com/
Other Link Sources
http://www.anarchists.co.uk/ an exellent web site with a lot of
interesting things to download.
http://kvaks.webjump.com/ Informations about the ps2 syscalls, opcodes
and registers.
http://ps2bios.webjump.com/ a disassembler for ps2.
http://ps2dev.sourceforge.net/ ps2 dev on sourceforge.
http://www.geocities.com/dylan_cuthbert/ a wery good page about game
developping trick, gcc inline asm and so on.
Others Ps2 development sites
http://www.anarchists.co.uk/
http://kvaks.webjump.com/
http://ps2bios.webjump.com/
http://ps2dev.sourceforge.net/
http://www.geocities.com/dylan_cuthbert/
Acid Software Psx Data http://www.acid.co.nz/simon/ps2/
E-consoles http://www.e-consoles.com/
Console Dev http://www.consoledev.com/
Max psx www.madpsx.com
Hardware information Sites
Mips http://www.mips.com/
Elf format documentation elf.pdf
SCE middleware newsletter http://www.tmstation.scei.co.jp/
GCC Home Page http://gcc.gnu.org/
Microsoft X-Box vs. Sony's PlayStation2
http://www.byte.com/documents/s=312/byt20000323s0007/
ECTS Awards 2002
http://www.gametavern.net/news/EpFpZFkZyuJjgnjjjE.shtml
I have an email to a friend of mine at http://www.redzonegames.com/
to see if there is anything he can add to this for you. They are in
final season for getting things done, so I don't really expect to hear
back from him soon, which is why I'm posting this answer for you
without waiting. But if he does send me a reply I'll post it for you
here. If there is anything else you believe is not covered by this
research, please don't hesitate to ask for Clarification.
Thanks,
webadept-ga |
Clarification of Answer by
webadept-ga
on
04 Nov 2002 23:44 PST
I'll give him a call in the morning and ask what the team size is for
Gameday. He'll know that off the top of his head. I know it's about
6-9 months, for them to do Gameday now, of course most of the story
board there is done. There are about 4 artists, and 2 wire-framers
working, 2 AI programmers and 2 other programmers. 2 Production
managers and then maybe 2 more misc type people. But I'll see if he
can give me a more exact count. This project, again, has been going on
for some time, so they have things "down" where "starting new" would
be a bit different.
Thanks,
webadept-ga
|
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