TOKYO - A report from Nikkei Electronics Wire says that Sony and Toshiba are working together on developing a chipset for Sony's next console, the PlayStation 2. Nikkei says that SCEI is planning to officially announce the PlayStation 2 to Japanese gamers later this month and predicts that the PS2 could be available by the end of next year. The chipset itself is set to be introduced at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference next February (an expo for chip makers).

　　Composed of two chips, the chipset is made up of a Digital Signal Processor (DSP) and a new RISC-based (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) processor. These two chips are believed to be for the PS2, although at this time there has been no official announcement regarding Sony's next machine.

　　The 10,500,000 transistor, 250 MHz DSP will combine 14 accumulators for floating point calculations that will help in the math processing of rich 3D graphics. Another rumor has suggested that Sony's PS2 will use a more advanced form of 3D graphics called NURBS thus dropping the current method of creating 3D graphics though polygons. Additionally, the DSP will also contain a hardware MPEG-2 decoder. You may already know MPEG-2 decoders as the chips that decode DVD movies for your TV or PC. If this report is true, gamers may be able to watch new DVD movies on their TVs.

　　NURBS (or Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline) is a technique that allows developers to specify 3D surfaces on object in an environment. Currently, gamers have only seen the use of this technology when viewing 3D automobile models on television. Characters in games could look as good as they do in Toy Story.

　　Also running at 250MHz, the RISC microprocessor, using MIPS architecture, will be two-way super scaler, with more than 100 new multimedia extensions. Internally, the RISC chip will combine an 8K data cache, a 16K command cache, and 16K of internal RAM.

　　In comparison, the 64-bit RISC-based SH-4 that powers the Sega Dreamcast, runs at 200 MHz. No word yet on what bit depth the new Sony/Toshiba chip will run at but we can safely assume it runs at 64-bit.