PSP owners have been hotly anticipating an official unlock of PSP's full capabilities. The system runs at 222MHz, 1/3 less than what the system is capable of. But, did you know that ever since firmware 3.0, the PSP has been running at 333MHz? Yes, it's true ... but the system only runs at maximum speed for emulated PSone games.
What? Didn't the original PlayStation run at 33MHz? Yes, it's true. So why does the PSP have to run ten times faster to run PSone games? Well, software emulation is pretty complex stuff (ask the people at Microsoft: they know a little something with Xbox 360's backwards compatibility). With Sony having unlocked the PSP's full clock speed, will wee see other games take advantage? I'm sure a studio like Ready at Dawn can do some truly amazing things.
[Via IGN]
See also:
Is 3.0 accelerating the PSP?
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
1-15-2007 @ 1:28AM
afiq tadza said...
i wish i can play normal psp games on that speed, because the loading times are a pain in the neck sometimes. i also wish we can change the speed manually. that would be cool.
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1-15-2007 @ 3:55AM
tsunamipepper said...
The emulation rule of thumb is the system doing the emulation has to be roughly ten times faster than the system it's emulating.
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1-15-2007 @ 11:33AM
redhotrobbit said...
The system has to be ten times faster? Haven't you guys ever heard of "Bleem"?
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1-15-2007 @ 11:59AM
Darren Tilley said...
The PSP has always been capable of running at 333mhz. The speed is switchable in software. This is not some feature that has been unlocked recently. Developers are heavily advised to run at the default speed of 222mhz due to battery life, however if a developer has a kick-ass game that needs the extra speed boost temporarily, it's a trivial matter to boost the clockspeed.
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1-15-2007 @ 12:28PM
Alien said...
Wow , that is inetresting , for PSone games lol , never thaught this comming :P
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1-15-2007 @ 4:44PM
afiq tadza said...
Thanks Dave for the information, i was actually really looking foward for a faster loading time psp. oh well, its still good news for me. thanks again.
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1-15-2007 @ 4:47PM
Dave said...
afiq tadza, the extra CPU speed won't affect loading at all. It's a matter of the speed of the UMD drive, which can't be altered. Really, the CPU speed isn't much of a bottleneck in most situations. The lack of RAM and the slow UMD loading drive tend to cause much more slowdown and present many more limitations. However, it's nice to see Sony "officially" unlock 333mhz. (Though I've been running most of my homebrew at 333 for months now. =P )
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1-15-2007 @ 5:30PM
obo said...
Yeah redhot - how did a third party emulate PS1 games with the Dreamcast's 200MHz processor, with half the RAM of the PSP and a GPU about 1/4 as powerful? Why can't the PSP at 222MHz? What do they need the extra processing power for?
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1-15-2007 @ 10:28PM
Brian said...
few notes (i work on psp games)
1) Developers can not change the lock speed of the CPU at the current time. Sony only lets comercial games run at 222Mhz.
2) PSP lacks a MMU/Tlb Cop0 instructions. Thus any game using virtual instructions must manualy be translated durring run time to the proper address. This is a big issue.
3) You can't compair cpu clock speed of one system vs another. A dreamcast at 200Mhz means nothing in comparison with a 222Mhz or 333Mhz psp.
4) While PS1 & PSP both use Mips processors (psp is a gen up from ps1), PS1 has alot of custom chips which must be recompiled to native PSP instructions. Second PS1 Display list must be completly rebuilt into something the PSP can render. This eats CPU time alot!
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