The PlayStation Portable (officially abbreviated PSP) is a handheld
game console released and manufactured by Sony Computer Entertainment<. Its development
was first announced during E3 2003, and it was officially unveiled on May 11, 2004 at a
Sony press conference before E3 2004. The system was released in Japan on December 12,
2004, North America on March 24, 2005 and in the PAL region on September 1, 2005. It is
the first handheld video game system to use an optical disc format (Universal Media Disc).
A new slimmer and lighter version of the PSP, appropriately titled Slim and Lite,
was announced on July 11, 2007, during Sony's press conference at E3 2007. It was made
available in the US, Europe and Japan in September 2007 with various colours and a very
different box packaging to the original PSP. Among these versions, three were physically
shown at E3 2007: a white version with a Star Wars imprint, a piano black version
and an ice silver version.
The PSP was designed by Shin'ichi Ogasawara for the Sony Computer Entertainment subsidiary
of Sony Corporation. Early models were made in Japan but in order to cut costs, Sony has
farmed out PSP production to non-Japanese manufacturers, mainly in China. The unit measures
170mm (6.7inches) in length, 74 mm (2.9 inches) in width, and 23mm (The PSP's main microprocessor
is a multifunction device named "Allegrex" that includes a 32-bit MIPS32 R4k-based CPU,a Floating
Point Unit, and a Vector Floating Point Unit. Additionally, there is a processor block known as
"Media Engine" that contains another 32-bit MIPS32 R4k-base CPU, hardware for multimedia decoding
(such as H.264), and a programmable DSP dubbed "Virtual Mobile Engine". The secondary CPU present
in the Media Engine is functionally equivalent to the primary CPU save for a lack of a VPU. The MIPS
CPU cores are globally clocked between 1 and 333 MHz. During the 2005 GDC, Sony revealed that it
had capped the PSP's CPU clock speed at 222 MHz for licensed software.Its reasons for doing so
are unknown, but are the subject of some speculation. Various homebrew tools enable users to
operate at 333 MHz, generally leading to a higher frame rate at the expense of battery life.
On June 22 2007, Sony Computer Entertainment confirmed that the firmware version 3.50 does in fact
remove this restriction and allows future games to run at the full 333 MHz speed. It does not
affect already-released games.
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