https://mdshock.com/2020/06/16/the-story-of-the-hitachi-sh-2-and-the-sega-saturn/
Just thought that I would share this. I love studying the technical and commercial decisions behind old video game consoles. This article is written from the perspective of Hitachi but it really shows the struggle that Sega was going through in trying to make the Saturn competitive with the Sony Playstation 1. Apparently, the decision to go with two SH-2 CPU's was made by Sega at the last minute because apparently Sega caught wind of a leak that the PS1 would have full 3D capabilities. The Saturn was originally planned to be a 2-2.5D console (eg. 2D play with 3D backgrounds) but the second SH-2 was added in late development to give it full 3D capabilities, which is covered from the Hitachi point of view in the later part of the article.
I can't think of many other consoles that had a primary dual cpu configurations in that era. Often, there were co-processors (such as the Reality Co-Processor in the N64) that handled DMA, etc, but one primary CPU. I wonder how much parallelization game developers were really able to achieve with the 2 x SH-2's, I had heard that most developers didn't know what to do with it. Some of the Saturn's later 3D games actually looked really impressive (eg. Panzar Dragoon Saga and the unreleased tech demo for Shenmue) and I wonder if it was because the second SH-2 eventually got utilized or if developers just found ways to squeeze the max potential out of a single SH-2 with the other providing minimal support.
Just thought that I would share this. I love studying the technical and commercial decisions behind old video game consoles. This article is written from the perspective of Hitachi but it really shows the struggle that Sega was going through in trying to make the Saturn competitive with the Sony Playstation 1. Apparently, the decision to go with two SH-2 CPU's was made by Sega at the last minute because apparently Sega caught wind of a leak that the PS1 would have full 3D capabilities. The Saturn was originally planned to be a 2-2.5D console (eg. 2D play with 3D backgrounds) but the second SH-2 was added in late development to give it full 3D capabilities, which is covered from the Hitachi point of view in the later part of the article.
I can't think of many other consoles that had a primary dual cpu configurations in that era. Often, there were co-processors (such as the Reality Co-Processor in the N64) that handled DMA, etc, but one primary CPU. I wonder how much parallelization game developers were really able to achieve with the 2 x SH-2's, I had heard that most developers didn't know what to do with it. Some of the Saturn's later 3D games actually looked really impressive (eg. Panzar Dragoon Saga and the unreleased tech demo for Shenmue) and I wonder if it was because the second SH-2 eventually got utilized or if developers just found ways to squeeze the max potential out of a single SH-2 with the other providing minimal support.