Sony's Playstation CPU
Another original article, probably from 1996:
Sony Computer Entertainment's PlayStation required an exceptionally fast custom microprocessor optimized for video game applications, priced for the consumer market, and ready in record time.
With its first-ever entry into the high-growth video game market, Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) leapfrogged the competition by designing and delivering its PlayStation video game platform with performance equivalent to the most powerful engineering workstation at a fraction of the price.
Using LSI's system-on-a-chip CoreWare methodology and 0.5-micron process technology to achieve low cost as well as high performance, SCE combined three different powerful processors onto a single chip. This reduces the size and cost of the PlayStation and creates a whole new level of video game performance.
Under the hood of the SCE PlayStation is LSI Logic's CoreWare-based processor, which can compute more than 200 million instructions per second making it the most powerful graphics microprocessor on the market.
Application-Optimized Engineering
More importantly, SCE and LSI Logic engineers worked together as a team to design the processor in a way that would optimize its performance to conform with the touch and feel of video game users as opposed to using a general-purpose microprocessor that performs many tasks, but none optizized for one particular application.
This heart-of-the-system CPU (central processing unit) includes three processors operating concurrently so that video game users experience real-time action displayed in arcade-quality graphics. On board the chip is a 32-bit MIPS-based RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) processor, a full-motion decompression engine that decompresses and prepares stored images for display on a television screen, and a high-performance graphics rendering engine to "draw" high-resolution animation, video and special effects images on a screen.
With its three built-in processors, the PlayStation chip handles the key video game instructions in hardware as opposed to software which improves the performance and picture quality and also lowers the cost.
This CPU is manufactured in LSI Logic's state-of-the-art 0.5-micron process technology, which is capable of integrating up to nine million transistors onto a single chip. This technology enabled LSI Logic to provide SCE with a tightly integrated, small-sized chip that meets the demanding cost objectives of the consumer marketplace.
Time to Market
Time to market is always critical, especially in a market characterized by fast-changing and unpredictable consumer tastes. Getting to market with the right products is difficult when the window of predictability in other words, visibility into the future declines the further out you look. That means electronics products must be designed and delivered in high volume in less than a year because it is nearly impossible to predict what technologies will be available and what consumers will want in two or three years.
These realities suggest that design cycles must be accelerated in order to exploit rapid-fire innovations in semiconductor technology and cater to an insatiable consumer appetite for higher performance and customized products.
By using LSI Logic's CoreWare methodology to design its CPU chip, Sony Computer Entertainment was able to mix and match industry standard cores that exist in LSI Logic's libraries, and add proprietary custom features to produce a product that was delivered in time for the 1994 Christmas selling season in Japan.
