ARM9 has full cache coherency between cores
Cortex-A9. If you call it ARM9 people will think you're talking about a DS
3 cores of 4 available to games
Arghh, Sony *shakes fist*
Would have been better had they put some other slower CPU core for whatever it is they think they need a core for. I don't know what code tends to be running on the Media Engine on PSP or that reserved SPU on PS3 but I have a hard time imagining it's really maxing them out.
Hopefully the core clocks and voltages are asynchronous, at least.
Split memory that can both be used for graphics very similarly to PS3. I heard somewhere already that VRAM would be 128MB (which is probably comparable to PS3's 256 considering the lower resolution of the NGP). No news yet about normal RAM. I would expect 256MB there, but perhaps 128MB could sitll happen.
128MB of VRAM is reasonable - tiled architecture means that you usually can get away with less VRAM, because:
- You usually don't need to store depth/stencil off-chip.
- There's no incentive to storing a floating point > 32bpp framebuffer, and in fact you can get away with a 16bpp one that looks nice.
- There's no real incentive to use several render targets for deferred shading techniques since the GPU does deferred shading already.
- NGP has PVRTC which supports better compression than S3TC on PS3.
You might need a little bit more memory due to storing binning information, but if it overwrites transformed vertex data in the process it could be a wash, given how much geometry gets culled off the list.