The PSP will rock your world with "MIPS R4000 32-Bit core"

Extra! Extra! At a recent Playstation conference in Japan, Sony announced the specs for their upcoming portable, appropriately called Playstation Portable. As was expected, the entire journalism industry got terribly excited despite the lack of an actual system prototype, game demos, or price point being shown or mentioned anywhere at the conference. But this can be forgiven; the system is a long way off, and readers are chomping at the bit to get any information they can on it, even if it is in the form of confusing, techno-jargon specs. Which brings me to the point of this article:



System specs are meaningless on their own



I know the readership for video game websites skews a little more tech savvy, but I find it hard to believe that the average reader will know what a "MIPS R4000 32-Bit core" is off-hand. And while sites like GameSpy, GamesIndustry.biz, GameSpot and Wired wrote out detailed articles explaining what the specs meant for the lay-audience, many sites were content to copy from Ken Kutagari's slide show and mention that the specs were "impressive."



Chief among the guilty are Slashdot and Evil Avatar who simply linked to this cryptic ZDNet Japan story that listed the full specifications in English but had no other information for those who can't speak Japanese. Gamerfeed and Spong aren't far behind, posting abbreviated spec lists with a minimum of analysis.



Some of these specs, like the "Shock Proof" Universal Media Disc, are useful to the public, but others, like "Sub Memory:2MB DRAM — 2.6GB/sec" are meaningless to most readers. It's the journalists job, when presented with confusing specs like these, to decipher them and lay them out in a way that everyone can understand. Sure, you can list the full specs for the technophiles in the audience (something Wired and GI.biz notably didn't do), but you need some analysis that goes beyond the numbers and puts the systems power in easily relatable terms. All the facts and figures in the world are meaningless if your audience can't understand them.



There's nothing wrong with spec lists in and of themselves; they provide valuable, early data on what a system will be capable of. But by themselves, they are useful only to electrical engineers and others who have a deep understanding of a computer's inner workings. Unless this is your main audience, explain the specs a little more.