It's more analogous to the PS2 and it's pipeline of arcane custom chips. All of them had their own flavor of assembly, including a few chips that handled 2 opcodes per line, each operation with different cycle latencies. These chips had to be driven by the DMA and synchronized with double buffers, to ensure you had a decent fillrate of polygons. The CPU had a 'scratchpad' which you could access in 1 cycle (as opposed to 30-200 from main memory depending on cache misses), and would also be piped in by the DMA. Also, one of its vector processors was accessible (slowly) directly from the main CPU as a coprocessor (the so-called macro mode), but could also be driven by the DMA (micro-mode). The main processor and the input/output processor were two flavors of MIPS, the latter being the same as the PS1 presumably to provide emulation.

I'm certain the PS2 architecture was written by a mad genius - and it took one to use it's system to the max. If it wasn't for popularity the PS1, it might have gone the way of the 3DO. The PS3 was a dream to work with in comparison.