The powerful CPU at the heart of Sony’s Vita could match the power of contemporary PCs, according to hardware giants ARM.
In the increasingly incestuous world of gaming hardware, ARM is everyone’s daddy. Their chips reside in the iPhone, the 3DS and the PS Vita - the latter of which reportedly has enough potential power to challenge the PC.
Nestled inside the Vita will be ARM’s quad-core Cortex-A9 design, which runs at (an apparently mighty) 2.50 DMIPS/MHz per core. ARM further claim to have tech demos of the CPU running at up to 2GHz, however, which would place it in the same ball park as your modern-day desktop.
“Game developers will get the best out of this platform,” said ARM’s media processing division general manager Lance Howarth to EDGE. “It’s going to be a massive leap on in terms of technology.”
What’s more, the quad-core setup of Vita’s CPU seems to reveal a Sony newly concerned with efficiency; whilst the Motorola Zoom, Galaxy Tab II and others have gone for a dual-core version of the Cortex-A9, Howarth reckons that it might be “more power efficient to run quad-core at a lower speed than dual-core at a higher speed”.
With the Vita now confirmed as region-free, boasting a killer launch line-up and featuring frankly absurd-sounding tech like this, the short period the 3DS has before its rival’s December 17th release date in Japan is looking more important by the day.
Link: http://beefjack.com/news/ps-vita-could-have-the-power-of-a-pc-hardware-dev/
