Sony tempers NGP power claims

Platform holder Sony has seemingly back-tracked on claims that its NGP handheld is as powerful as the PS3.

That was the line being fed to publishing and development partners earlier in the year before the machine’s official unveiling.

However, Kotaku reports that speaking at GDC SCEA platform research manager has put these eyebrow-raising boast into perspective.

"Some people in the press have said ‘Wow, this thing could be as powerful as a PS3’," he stated. "Well, it’s not going to run at 2GHz because the battery would last five minutes and it would probably set fire to your pants."

He added that the machine will in face contain processing power that sits somewhere around halfway between the current PSP and the PS3. Internally it is similar to home consoles, however, with four symmetrical CPU cores, significantly more memory than PSP and PS3-like RAM.

It was also confirmed that NGP games will come on either a 2GB or 4GB flash card, both of which will include an unspecified amount of writable memory.