Technical Details for the PSP

The PlayStation Portable unit was designed by Shin'ichi Ogasawara, with early models made in Japan. In order to cut costs, later models were produced elsewhere; mainly in China.

Basic Dimensions

The PSP measures 170 mm (6.7 inches) in length, 74 mm (2.9 inches) in width, and 23 mm (0.9 inches) in depth, and has a weight of 280 grams (0.62 lb) including the battery. The TFT LCD screen measures 110 mm (4.3 in) diagonal with a 16:9 ratio and a 480x272 pixel resolution capable of 16.77 million colours.

Processor

The console's main microprocessor is a multifunction device that includes a MIPS R4000-based CPU, hardware for multimedia decoding (such as H.264), along with a vector unit known as the "Virtual Mobile Engine". The MIPS CPU core is globally clocked between 1 and 333 MHz, although Sony revealed in 2005 that it had capped the unit's CPU clock speed at 222 MHz for licensed software. Various homebrew tools enable users to operate at 333 MHz, generally leading to a higher framerate at the expense of battery life.

Memory

The unit has 32 MiB main RAM and 4 MiB embedded DRAM. There is no memory management unit for the CPU, and the coprocessor that normally manages the Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB)-based memory management unit (MMU) has no integrated memory.

Graphics

The 166 MHz graphics chip has 2 MiB embedded memory and through its 512 bit interface provides hardware polygon and NURBS rendering, environment projection and texture mapping, hardware directional lighting, clipping, texture compression and tessellation, fogging, alpha blending, depth and stencil tests, vertex blending for morphing effects and dithering, all in 16 or 24 bit colour. The graphics chip also handles image output. The console is capable of rendering 33 million flat-shaded polygons per second, with a 664 million pixel per second fill rate.

Battery

The PSPs default 3.6V/1800mAh battery can power the unit for approximately 3-6 hours during gameplay, 3-5 hours during video playback, and up to 10 hours during audio only playback. However, battery life may drop to less than 3 hours when accessing a wireless network. An extended-life 2200 mAh battery will increase these times by approximately 20%.

In addition, players may use the sleep mode that uses minimal battery power to keep the system's RAM active, allowing for 'instant on' functionality when the sleep function is disabled. The console may be left in sleep mode for long periods of time (24 hours or so) without having any effect on the battery life.