NGP is a powerful handheld, but it won't rival the PlayStation 3 in terms of raw computing grunt, Sony engineers said at GDC last night.

Instead, the new portable sits about "halfway" between the original PSP and PS3, Kotaku reports.

David Coombes, platform research manager at Sony Computer Entertainment America, told attendees during a talk on NGP's technical specs: "Some people in the press have said 'Wow, this thing could be as powerful as a PS3.'

"Well, it's not going to run at 2 GHz because the battery would last five minutes... and it would probably set fire to your pants."

Coombes also said NGP will use four symmetrical CPU cores, compared to a single core, single hardware thread for the PSP, and that it'll have "a lot of memory compared to the PSP", its RAM being closer in size to PS3. NGP games will be stored on 2 GB or 4 GB cards.

Sony took the wraps of a new NGP augmented reality tech demo at GDC yesterday too, leaving our man Tim stunned.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/29 ... s3-claims/

Cards, hmmm...