| davygee said: As far I as I was aware, the PSP was restricted to 222Mhz when released. I have no proper reasoning why they did this, although it could be down to battery life, although I doubt it affects battery life that much to be honest. Only recently was one game (as far as I know), that was allowed by Sony to up the clock to 266Mhz, this was Rachet & Clank Size Matters. I reckon this decision is for 2 reasons, firstly, Sony was holding back to CPU speed to allow developers to create better looking games further down to PSP's lifecycle and secondly more recently, when Ready At Dawn were interviewed by IGN, they stated that their one wish for the PSP was to have the CPU non restricted and allow then the full 333Mhz to play with. Seeing as Chains of Olympus is now being regarded as one of the hugh releases for this year on the PSP, Sony may very well have backed down and allowed for the clock to be upped at this stage rather than leaving it another year or so. I don't have a problem with Sony restricting the clock speed as long as eventually they remove that restriction, which looks likely. It's not being deceptive to the consumer at all. The consumer isn't buying a machine knowing that they will get the best games out at the start. What this restriction has done, is allow for the development of games so far using only 2/3rds of the processing power available over the longer term, which should allow for bigger and better games using effectively another 50% more power. |
Paragraph1: They did it because of battery life. Sony restricted the clock speed to 222mhz and in addition they did not allow streaming from the UMD drive. The UMD drive eats more power than the CPU. Having developers use the PSP at full clock and stream data directly from the UMD drive would dramatically reduced the systems battery life.
Paragraph2: Battery life was the reason. It makes no sense for them to spend the extra money on chips that run at 333mhz if they intended on the system being clocked lower. Sony was entering a market dominated by Nintendo. What sense does it make for them to forcibly handicap themselves and developers for accessing the PSP chipset at full speed.
Paragraph3: I see, so instead including a higher capacity battery, or designing a chipset that was more power efficient. Sony should put restrictions on developrs instead. They should include a disc drive that provides an exceptional amount of space at 1.8GB, but prohibit developers from streaming from it. Provide a 333mhz chipset but restrict developers from using it to its fullest capacity. The fact is that Sony included hardware in the PSP that they handicapped because of battery life issues. This shows that the system was poorly designed. Frankly, I'm surprised that anyone would defend a company for taking shortcuts in product design.
