PS2 Technical Overview
Posted by @ 4:32 PM, EST
Firingsquad posted a technical overview of the PS2.
Here’s a bit:

The Emotion Engine is the main processor of the PS2 and performs all of the 3D geometry calculations. The major components to the Emotion Engine are the MIPS CPU core, the FPU, the MPEG-2 decoder, and two additional floating-point vector processors: VPU0 and VPU1. These are just different parts of the CPU, in the same way a GeForce has a 2D core and a 3D core. The vector units are the most unique components of the chip.

Vector units can be thought of as specialized FPUs that are extremely fast at evaluating the multiplication and addition of vector equations. An FMAC (Floating-Point Multiply-Adder Calculator) is the silicon inside of a FPU that actually does the math. They're used for doing vector dot products, for example.