Panasonic M2 - Technical Specifications

Technical Specifications

• Central Processing Unit - Dual 66 MHz PowerPC 602s
  • Implements the 32-bit PowerPC RISC instruction set architecture
  • PowerPC CPU designed for consumer electronics applications
  • 1.2 watts power usage each
  • 32-bit general purpose registers and ALU
  • 33 MHz 64-bit multiplexed address and data bus
  • 4 KiB data and instruction caches (Level 1). No Level 2 cache
  • 1 integer unit, 1 floating point unit, no branch processing unit, 1 load/store unit
  • SPECint92 rating of 40 each, approximately 70 MIPS each.
  • 1 million transistors manufactured on a 0.50 micrometre CMOS process
• Custom ASICs
  • BDA:
    • Memory control, system control, and video/graphic control
    • Full triangle renderer including setup engine, MPEG-1 decoder hardware, DSP for audio and various kinds of DMA control and port access
    • Random access of frame buffer and z-buffer (actually w-buffer) possible at the same time
  • CDE:
    • Power bus connected to BDA and the two CPUs
    • "bio-bus" used as a low-speed bus for peripheral hardware
• Renderer capabilities:
  • 1 million un-textured triangles/s geometry rate
  • 100 million pixels/s fill rate
  • reportedly 700,000 textured polygons/s *without* gouraud shading or additional effects
  • reportedly 300,000 to 500,000 textured polygons/s *with* gouraud shading, lighting and effects
  • shading: flat shading and gouraud shading
  • texture mapping
  • decal, modulation blending, tiling (16K/128K texture buffer built-in)
  • hardware z-buffer (16-bit) (actually a block floating point with multiple (4) range w-buffer)
  • object-based full-scene anti-aliasing
  • alpha channel (4-bit or 7-bit)
  • 320x240 to 640x480 resolution at 24-bit color
• Sound hardware - 16-bit 32-channel DSP at 66 MHz (within BDA chip)
• Media - Quad-speed CD-ROM drive (600 KB/s)
• RAM - Unified memory subsystem with 8 MB/s
  • 64-bit bus resulting in peak 533 MB/s bandwidth
  • Average access 400 MB/s
• Full Motion Video - MPEG-1
• Writable Storage - Memory cards from 128 KiB to 32 MiB
• Expansion Capabilities - 1 PCMCIA port (potentially used for Modems, Ethernet NICs, etc.)