Architecture of the Playstation 2
The PlayStation 2 is actually one of the original reasons I got interested in the computer engineering space. The EE chip is a sort of who's-who of optimization techniques - hardware decoding, vector processing, VLIW architecture (for the VUs), memory bandwidth tailored to keeping the huge amount of functional units busy with a constant stream of math to do.<p>At some point I got a port of Debian (BlackRhino GNU/Linux) running on my PS2 - slowly, off a USB 1.1 thumbdrive, as I lacked the hard drive / network card adapter. Never got too far with it owing mostly to lack of the network, but in spite of being a 1999 console, it ran X11 at 1080i just fine.