Sony's NeoGeo Pocket's (PSP2/Vita) business/non technical ramifications talk

Informative article about Vita internals and design wins...

Sony Playstation Vita Teardown & Product Analysis
http://www.ubmtechinsights.com/teardowns/sony-playstation-vita-teardown/

Powering the Playstation Vita is a chip that is an industry-first for portable gaming (and handsets) - a quad-core ARM-based processor designed by the same partnership that brought out the CELL processor used in the Playstation 3. Manufactured in a joint effort between Sony, IBM and Toshiba, the CXD5315GG is a four core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processor. There was some speculation that Samsung would be the manufacturer but Sony looks to have chosen a fab that it had comfort with working in the past.
Click to expand...

Contrary to the "halved memory to 256Mb" rumor, Vita has 512Mb memory according to this shot:
http://www.ubmtechinsights.com/uplo...re_Teardown(1)/playstation-vita-front-web.jpg
 
Why would IBM and Toshiba care to manufacture this quad-core ARM? STI doesn't own a fab anyhow, so that excerpt doesn't make much sense.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
Why would IBM and Toshiba care to manufacture this quad-core ARM? STI doesn't own a fab anyhow, so that excerpt doesn't make much sense.
Click to expand...

Well Toshiba has only been in it for the manufacturing anyhow, so it looks like they get a nice contract out of it. IBM is a bit of a puzzle though, maybe they wanted the design experience in the handheld/ARM market? The chip though is more than just a quad core ARM, it's a SoC/APU right?
 
Yeah, I think you're right,. Reading the whole article, IBM designed the chip with Sony, they may want to be aiming to compete with the likes of Samsung in providing ARM based systems for mobiles where IBM otherwise have no presence. Toshiba are in it for the manufacturing. I don't think STI is really the same thing, though. This wasn't a joint venture AFAICT, but Sony partnering with IBM for the SOC design, and getting Toshiba to manufacture it.

Incidentally, the article talks of the quad-core ARM, but not the SGX. The chip supposedly contains 512 MB Samsung DDR2. Then there's the Toshiba memory module, which confuses me. I'm not getting a clear picture of how this device is pieced together!
 
While looking for MP4+ info, I found this interesting, headache-inducing article:

"From the core to a broad audience"
http://translate.google.com/transla...ess.co.jp/docs/series/rt/20111215_499020.html

Andrew House talks about "socializing" core games, and bridging casual gamers over.

Besides the 4 launch social apps (Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, and Skype), it sounds like they have announced Flickr service for Vita (in Japan only ?). House says more will come later.

The Facebook support in PS3 Photo Gallery is quite nice (but somewhat clumsy and hidden). It uses a Timeline metaphor with face analysis that predates FaceBook's own effort. It's just too bad Sony doesn't seem to know how to integrate these things into one exclusive experience.
 
Why ?

That chart tracks sales for the period of December 12 through December 18.

3DS was launched in Japan in late Feb 2011.
Vita was launched on 17 Dec 2011.

Here's the full top 20, covering December 12 through December 18. Life to date sales, publisher and release date are in parentheses.

...

Here's the full hardware chart, with last week's sales in parentheses.

1. 3DS: 367,691 (350,321)
2. PSV: 324,859
3. PS3: 65,119 (44,661)
4. PSP: 64,468 (51,191)
5. Wii: 60,916 (46,018)
6. DSi LL: 5,600 (4,007)
7. X360: 3,584 (3,211)
8. DSi: 3,523 (2,609)
9. PS2: 1,400 (1,268)
10. DS Lite: 32 (14)
Click to expand...
 
Shifty Geezer said:
Incidentally, the article talks of the quad-core ARM, but not the SGX. The chip supposedly contains 512 MB Samsung DDR2. Then there's the Toshiba memory module, which confuses me. I'm not getting a clear picture of how this device is pieced together!
Click to expand...

Supposedly there's 512MB main memory and 128MB of some kind of faster (GDDR?) video memory.
 
Yes it matters. It is early days for Vita, but Nintendo shows its combined power of Monster Hunter and Mario 3D Land and Kart, and the price cut, put the 3DS at a great position. Monster Hunter is a true system seller. Vita will have its work cut out in Japan.
 
ya, unless the initial shipment of 500k was wrong and it was much smaller. Or ppl just want wifi models which was under shipped. Really want to system to succeed, watch a few hours of live stream on launch day, looks very amazing.
 
Meanwhile, Google claims 700,000 Android phones activated per day.

And on Christmas day, Android and iOS devices saw a combined 6.8 million units activated.

The dedicated handheld gaming device niche is shrinking before our very eyes.
 
I wonder how many of them bought their phone with gaming in mind? As many as 1% maybe? Nah that's far too ambitious.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
think Sony should speed up with the apps support and PS suite thing, make it does more than just games. It it does everything that tablet now do beside phone it might be a much more compelling device. Updating their Vita browser would be a huge step forward :)
 
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