Sony NGP: behind the specs

Announced yesterday to a generally positive response, Sony is billing its NGP console as the next generation in handheld gaming. Due out at the end of the year, the sleekly designed device boasts a 5in OLED screen, multi-touch control pad, twin analogue sticks, front and rear cameras, and 3G connectivity. But perhaps the most intriguing element is hidden away inside the machine.

Crucially, Sony has abandoned the internally developed MIPS architecture that powered the PSP, and has opted for an ARM processor, with a PowerVR graphics processing unit. This puts the machine inline with massive majority of high-end smartphones: ARM reckons 95% of all current mobile handsets have application processors based on its IP, while Imagination Technologies, the developer of the PowerVR graphics chipset, claims 200 current models feature its technology. ARM and PowerVR chips are in the Apple iPad as well as high profile Google handsets such as the Galaxy S.

The appeal of both these technologies is obvious: relatively high performance at ultra-low power consumption. The Kings Langley-based Imagination has been developing graphics acceleration hardware since the mid-90s, and the first-generation of the PowerVR GPU chipset in the NGP was developed for the Sega Dreamcast, which, with its watercooled architecture, was a much more power efficient console than its greedy and noisy successors. From here, the company set out to specialise in the mobile market.

"The 3D technology we supply is different from mainstream desktop 3D technologies," says Imagination spokesman David Harold. "We have an approach named tile-based deferred rendering, which means we only draw objects that are going to be visible to the end-user, and we process the majority of the information on the chip rather than constantly reading and writing off to external memory. That means lower power requirements and a much better performance and efficiency within mobile systems."

ARM, too, has a focus on wringing high performance out of lower power. "The Cortex A9 gives an approximate raw performance of 2.5 DMIPS/Mhz," says marketing director Jim Wallace. "If you compare that to an Intel Atom, a dual-core A9 running at 800MGhz gives you a performance that's similar to a hyper-threaded Atom running at 1.6ghz. So you can run the A9 at significantly lower frequency, which means lower power, but the same performance."

And the NGP is operating at the upper end of these processor ranges. Its quad-core Arm Cortex A9 processor possibly won't be found anywhere else this year. "Most of the phones currently on the market use the Arm Cortex A8," says Dan Grabham, editor of Tech Radar. "The A9 is just emerging now and the phones we'll see announced at the Mobile World Congress in February will certainly be A9-based. We reckon the NGP will use a Texas Instruments OMAP 4 processor (Arm licenses its IP to chipset manufacturers who then build their own chips around the technology) – certainly dual-core variants of that are coming out soon, and they're already coupled with the PowerVR graphics as well."

Even the high-end phones and tablet computers that do feature A9 technology – for example, the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, the Motorola Droid Bionic and the LG Optimus 2 – are all dual-core implementations. Chip manufacturers such as Nufront. Nec and nVidia are working on products that feature quad-core A9 tech, but we're not expecting announcements until much later in the year.

Of course, more cores doesn't necessarily equate to more processing power. It's interesting that Epic's Tim Sweeney declared at the NGP launch that the product is four times more powerful than any other handheld device out there – perhaps referring to standards like the Apple iPad, which only uses a single Arm core. But processor performance depends on myriad factors including clock speed and implementation with the OS. At the very least, a multicore set-up allows processing tasks to be shared between cores, which reduces the frequency and voltage and therefore power consumption – good news when battery life is an issue.

Meanwhile, the PowerVR SGX543 graphics processing unit is the latest addition to Imagination's SGX range, offering support for Open-GL as well as shader-based graphics – the fundaments of console gaming visuals. It also boasts a real-world performance of 35m polygons-per-second, and promises ultra smooth HD visuals – and that's a single core iteration, the NGP implementation is MP4, a quad-core architecture.

And again, very few other manufacturers are implementing multi-core SGX GPUs as this stage. "There are more than 10 chip designs going on using our SGX multi-core technology right now," says David Harold. "But only two of them are in the public domain: a mobile phone and tablet focused product from Renesas – and that's SGX MP2 – and this one from Sony which is MP4."

So the NGP specifications are advanced right now. But as we've mentioned, mobile phone development moves fast, and manufacturers will be announcing smartphones, and the emerging new class of superphones, with quad-core ARM and PowerVR chipsets by the end of the year. So should Sony be worried that, at some point in the next few months, a handset is announced that trumps this flagship gaming machine for specs?

"I think the brief answer is no," says Harold. "And in fact, what Sony will do is benefit from the huge ecosystem of developers that has built up around mobile phones and mobile phone gaming. They will be able to move these skillsets toward Sony's business model."

And actually, it could be this proximity to smartphone design that really aids the NGP and shapes Sony's handheld business model going forward. Through the use of ARM architecture, the company is making its device accessible to a whole new community of developers.

As Wallace claims, "ARM has done a tremendous amount of work with Google over the years – we're its lead technology partner. A lot of the technologies that have been implemented in phones are specific to ARM, in terms of the native development kits. There are a whole host of games that work foremost on ARM – the classic example is Angry Birds: a lot of the code is ARM-based."

At the same time, Sony's PlayStation Suite concept, which will make PlayStation-quality titles available on Android phones, is a means of capturing a massive audience of casual gamers, currently frustrated by the Android Market. "PlayStation Suite is really interesting," says veteran mobile technology analyst, Stuart Dredge.

"Android gaming has been a real wasteland. At the Mobile Games Forum in London on Wednesday, developers were queuing up to say how annoyed they are with Android Market, how they couldn't sell games on it. Something like 300,000 new Google Android devices are being activated daily, but gaming has been a real issue. So there's this huge market of Android owners looking for games, and Sony could fill that gap."

Dredge also sees the NGP's 3G implementation as a key factor. "I use the Wi-Fi facility on my PSP, but you have to be in one place to use it, you can't be travelling. So the idea of a handheld console with 3G connectivity is really exciting, because as a developer you'll be able to assume connectivity. This should lead to many more highly connected titles, and of course social games – integrating things like Facebook connectivity becomes more viable if you can depend on the fact that the device will be connected to a network."

Of course, this issue may well be muddied slightly by the possibility that Sony will release different versions of the console, some with Wi-Fi only, and some with both Wi-Fi and 3G (just like Apple did with iPad, and Amazon did with Kindle), but with no firm release or pricing details, we'll have to wait and see.

Ultimately, those writing the NGP off as another niche piece of gaming equipment for hardcore Sony fans, are being a little unfair. With its smartphone-style architecture, it is opening up the development environment to a vibrant eco-system of Android coders, and with 3G connectivity, there are possibilities for VoIP calls and other connected services. In a marketplace soon to be stuffed with netbooks, tablets, smartphones and superphones, the NGP ill find it difficult to compete on those terms – but then it will also boast high-end console games.

Meanwhile, pitching it against the Nintendo 3DS is not really accurate either, just as the old PSP vs DS battle was a total mismatch. The NGP's biggest problem is that its going to be operating in a niche of its own, hovering between high-end handheld console and mainstream feature-rich mobile computing device.

The price is likely to reflect this. I'd hazard a guess at £300-350, putting it between the 3DS and the iPad. It will have to draw every single benefit from its superlative architecture to perform in that space.