Chapter 3. Functional overview of the Playstation 2

Table of Contents

Layout of the Playstation 2
R5900 Emotion Engine CPU core
Floating Point Unit (FPU)
Cache and Scratchpad RAM (SPR)
DMA, DRAM and Memory Management Unit (MMU)
Interrupt controller and Timers
Vector Processor Unit 0 (VPU0/VU0/COP1)
Vector Processor Unit 1 (VPU1/VU1/COP2)
Graphics Synthesizer (GS)
Image Processing Unit (IPU)
I/O Processor (IOP)
USB 1.0 Controller
Sony i.Link (Firewire) Controller
Sound Processing Unit (SPU2)
System bus controllers
System Interface (SIF) and System bus (SBUS) controllers
VPU Interface (VIF0 and VIF1)
Graphics Interface (GIF)
DMA Controller
RDRAM Controller

Layout of the Playstation 2

The Playstation 2 is a very complex beast, composed of several different types of specialized processors that are designed to operate in parallel. Most of the processors can access other parts of the system independently and thus a great deal of the work in the PS2 can be performed unattended by the main processor.

Figure 3.1. Block diagram of the Playstation 2

The diagram above shows the functional layout of the Playstation 2. The system can be broken down into three groups; graphics, control, and I/O. Most control and calculations happen in the Emotion Engine (EE), graphics rendering is done mostly in the Graphics Synthesizer (GS), and I/O is handled by the I/O Processor (IOP).