Well, let's look at this in depth. If you're afraid of techno-talk, please leave the room now. You have been warned. PSP came out in 2004. The system was running dual MIPS R4000 CPUs at 333MHz. Its proprietary GPU was clocked at 166MHz. It had 32MB of ram (upgraded to 64MB in PSP-2000 and forward). A variant of the same CPU was used in Silicon Graphics workstations and servers in the 90's. Despite its slow clock speed, it's no slouch. It's also highly similar to the MIPS R5900 found in the Playstation 2's "Emotion Engine" processing unit. The PSP was somewhere along the lines of a Playstation 1.5 in terms of power. Much more powerful than a Playstation 1, but not quite as powerful as a Playstation 2. The Nintendo GameCube came out in late 2001 in some markets. It featured an IBM PowerPC CPU clocked at 485 MHz. While this CPU was completely custom to the GameCube, it was running on the PowerPC 750 architecture, making it very close in performance to a PowerPC G3 equipped Apple Macintosh as the architecture was shared. It also run a custom ATi graphics chip at 162MHz. Total system ram was 43MB: 24MB of main system RAM, 3MB of static RAM dedicated to the graphics chip as a cache, and 16MB for DVD and I/O space. Some argue the GameCube is faster than a Playstation 2, some (like me) argue the Playstation 2 is actually faster. They're both slower than the original Xbox, which was an x86-based Pentium 3 and Nvidia GeForce system. Now, as for the New 3DS... it's more powerful... or so you may think. It's a little weird. The NN 3DS runs an 804MHz ARM 11 chip. This is very odd. ARMv6, as it was called, was originally released around the same time as the Nintendo GameCube: 2001. It's a very old architecture and ARM doesn't really recommend it be used anymore. The NN 3DS also has 256MB of system RAM with 64MB of that dedicated to the OS, and it has 10MB of VRAM for its 204MHz PICA200 GPU. The PICA series are a range of off-the-shelf GPUs and are supposed to run at 400MHz, but I guess either thermal or power limitations limit the chip to the 204MHz PICA200 variant in the NN 3DS. Is it more powerful? I'd say yes and no. It'll probably match a PSP, but I don't think it has the graphical power of a GameCube for one simple reason: The GameCube's chip was fully custom and had the luxury of being in a full-bore console with proper power delivery and thermal management.
