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碩士原創(chuàng)英語(yǔ)論文
Special architectures: PlayStation 2 EE6442 Assignment 3 Fan Zhang University of Limerick MEng. Computer and Communication Systems ID: 0526401 Abstract: I am a video game fan, but not an addict. Since this topic attracted me a lot, I decided to choose this one as my topic for the third assignment of Processor Architecture Module. I started to play video games since I was five. While I was playing games, I found the game console itself just like a mystery, how could they react our actions to the controller then reflects so amazing pictures on TV? Although I have read a lot about it in game magazines, I admit that I didn’t try to find the answer until I found this topic. This is a great chance for me to answer the question myself. At the same time, I want to present you this paper, which should be fun. This paper concerns the differences of architecture between PC and PlayStation 2. Since the purposes of PC and PlayStation 2 are different (or maybe I should say the purposes of PC include that of PlayStation 2), the different objectives decide the different design orientation. I think PlayStation 2 is a good game console for the comparison. First, a lot of documentations about PlayStation 2’s Emotion Engine can be found in the Internet. Second, as far as I know, PlayStation 2’s design has straightforward purposes: 3D games and multimedia, which makes the game console is seemed to be born for these two reasons. Contrasts to PlayStation, current PCs do very well on these two aspects, but the cost is the unstoppable upgrade of hardware. PlayStation 2 is a product born 5 years ago. Today tens of millions of people are still enjoy PlayStation games at home. 5-year-old PCs have been washed out already. Keywords: PC, processor, video card, system controller, bus, Emotion Engine, Vector Unit, Graphics Synthesize. 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1 The evolution of game performance The computer technology has achieved rapid evolution this year. From Figure 1.1 to Figure 1.5 you can see, in almost twenty years, how great changes of game performance are, both PC and game consoles. Figure 1.1: Final Fantasy I (FC) 1987 by SQUARE Figure 1.2: Final Fantasy XII (PlayStation 2) 2006 by SQUARE ENIX Figure 1.3: Prince of Persia (PC) 1989 by Broderbund Figure 1.4 Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones (PC) 2006 by Ubisoft The screenshots above are the evidences of technique developments. In these twenty years, computers are almost 10 times faster than in the 1980’s. The cost of buying a computer is decreasing simultaneously. However, the development orientations of both PC and game consoles didn’t change much during these 20 years. Here I want to say game consoles and PC are different, although they both can be classified to ‘computer’ class, although PC includes all game consoles’ functions (but the software are not compatible each other). The differences include many areas, the architecture, the media, the software producing and selling model, and the customers. 1.2 Why they are different? I would rather to say it is because of the distinct purposes. Of course PC can play games, can do anything that game consoles do, and in the present, PlayStation 2, the most famous game console in the world, can connect to Internet, can print paper, even can run complete Linux operating system, but PC is general purpose, this means PC should care too much things, and be good at almost everything. For instance, PC should be good at text processing, games, printing, Internet connection, a huge amount of protocols are settled for it; PC also need to compatible with all components and software that are designed and implemented by current standards. But game consoles are different. They need only care about games, which mean most designs are flexible. At the same time, the standards which PC has to obey do not affect it at all. No extra cost, no burden, only focus on games.Figure 1.5: Sony’s PlayStation 21.3 Multimedia From later 20th century, multimedia has become one of the main purposes of PC. Corresponding new technology for enhancing the capability of multimedia processing on PC has been developed as well. However, the reality of transmission speed bottleneck hasn’t been changed much. Keith Diefendorff and Pradeep K. Dubey published an article named “How Multimedia workloads will change Processor Design” in 1996. They argued the dynamic media processing would be a big challenge for current processor architecture. They also thought it will force the fundamental changes in processor design. Before Pentium 4, the processors shared the same character: their data cache memory was big, but instruction cache memory was relatively small. It was quite useful for most usage, for instance, word editor, e-business, stock information processing, and so on. However, Diefendorff did not think it is useful, or efficient enough for multimedia processing, for multimedia data come and forth constantly, no need to settle a huge bulk of storage space for holding the information that rarely has chance of reuse. Contrarily, multimedia processing requires more calculation than others. So, for multimedia calculation, the instruction cache memory should become larger, both caches require faster transmission speed as well. We shall see this prediction has realized much in both Pentium 4 and PlayStation 2. 1.4 The purpose and the brief layout of the article This paper is mainly talk about the architectural differences between PC and PlayStation 2, which is the most famous game console in the world. The article will discuss several aspects, the whole architecture, the CPU, the motherboard, and the graphics. In the following section, the whole architectures are compared. Two processors, Intel’s Pentium 4 and PlayStation 2’s Emotion Engine are discussed and compared in the third section. The fourth section is about the bus and caching comparison. The fifth section mainly talks about PC and PlayStation 2’s graphic devices, Video card and Graphics Synthesizer. The conclusion will be made in the last section. 2. WHOLE ARCHITECTURE COMPARISON 2.1 PC architecture The basis of PC could root back to 1940’s. John von Neumann (1903-57), who constructed a very basis structure of computer, stayed his name in the history forever. The architecture of modern PC is still based mainly on his architecture. Let’s see a diagram of PC architecture as our basis of illustrating how PC works for game performance in the future. Figure 2.1: PC architecture---------------------------------
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