Apparently they heard your concerns about L2-Cache: http://mips.com/products/cores/32-64-bit-cores/mips32-1074k/
Looks like I got the rug pulled out from under me on this one.
its a challenge to improve old existing games, new games could be just be tested and potentially white-listed to enable some enhancing features (adjust for a bigger framebuffer or whatever). And there are quite a few gems on PSP, its sure as better than having nothing except a couple launch titles. I dont see why PSN stuff shouldnt be transferable (as long as its technical feasible), expect a big outcry if it aint.
I didn't know you meant new games. If they have to distribute digitally to begin with exactly what do they gain in selling a dual-platform binary?
Matter of resources and quite possibly licensing. Just look at how few PS2-PS3-ports there are to date, and the different availability of PSOne games.
And how about PS1 games that have been hand improved for a new platform? I don't know of any.
I doubt a good vector-instruction set will be redundant anytime soon for multimedia-media, there is more that uses it than just transforming vertices. Also it surely is nice beeing able to devote the GPU entirely to pixel-processing if you need it (assuming it has unified shaders).
And there'll be more to GPU shaders than just transforming vertices (and lighting pixels) too.
I dont think most of the games available there have much specific code for ARM, rather they are beeing tied to the iOS - which Sony plainly wont use Im sure. Adding an isolated Android-runtime to tap into those apps would be the most logical IMHO.
Lots and lots of Android apps do run native code, Android off of ARM is probably not much of a starter at this point...
I cant speak of compilers, I dont have access to the proprietary ones and gcc seems to put out equivalently bad code for everything not x86. Given that every Sony-console prior to PS3 was MIPS and a good part of the devs doing big games have experience with those Id say that going ARM would be a change and not MIPS. But as you said yourself, the ISA itself wont matter that much with most of development beeing done in C/C++ or even higher level stuff.
Fortunately developers do have access to the proprietary stuff, where performance matters for ARM talking about GCC is kind of irrelevant. The best ARM compiler is beating GCC by a margin as much as 2x in many apps. PS2 and PS1 are ancient history now and there are probably more devs experienced with the myriad of ARM devices than PSP.
In perf/MHz 74k is leading (2.5 vs 2.4) in the link I posted... I know synthetic tests.. but thats all I have.
Interesting. Is it lower numbers on the new part doing it?