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.)

Read more about this topic:  Panasonic M2

Famous quotes containing the word technical:

    “Woman is the future of man. That means that the world which was once formed in man’s image will now be transformed to the image of woman. The more technical and mechanical, cold and metallic it becomes, the more it will need the kind of warmth that only the woman can give it. If we want to save the world, we must adapt to the woman, let ourselves be led by the woman, let ourselves be penetrated by the Ewigweiblich, the eternally feminine!”
    —Milan Kundera (b. 1929)