Tearing Down the Original PlayStation on Its 25th Anniversary: 33.9 MHz CPU, 32-bit GPU

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This week marks the 25th Anniversary of the Sony PlayStation, and what better way to celebrate than with a teardown of the legendary console? iFixit has done just that, disassembling the PS1’s guts and showing just how far gaming hardware has come since the nineties. Back then, all that developers had to work with was a MIPS R3000 33.9 MHz, 32-bit RISC CPU, 32-bit GPU, 2 MB of RAM, 1 MB of VRAM, 24 channels of 16-bit PCM stereo sound, and a CD-ROM drive that could only read at 2x speed.

It’s amazing how far gaming consoles have come in 25 years. The PlayStation 4 has nearly 50x the processing power and 4,000x more RAM than this ancient fossil—and the PS4 Pro runs laps around the PS4. And we’ve already got a feeling 2020’s PS5 will be even better.

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Tsing Mui
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