are *.cbn files smaller or faster then psx2psp *.pbp files?
Short answer: PBP is probably smaller on average, but not by a whole lot. CBN *might* be faster for some games, but not by a whole lot if at all.
Long answer: As for size, .cbn files probably are larger than .pbp files, because .pbp files compress 16 sectors together instead of just one, resulting in more efficient compression. Underneath, they both use the same compression algorithm (DEFLATE, same as what a ZIP file uses). Neither format will be able to compress certain portions of a CD like FMV movies, as they are already stored compressed, nor will they do much to compress the XA audio tracks that many games use for speech/music, as they are already pretty compressed by the XA ADPCM format.
Neither format seems to compress CD audio tracks, either, possibly for performance reasons (too taxing on CPU).As for speed, I'm not sure to be honest and I haven't done any comparisons. Any time a CD sector is read and it hasn't already been decompressed, a .pbp will require that all 16 sectors it is compressed together with be read and decompressed along with it, whereas a CD sector in a .cbn file will be read and decompressed solitarily. So, depending on how a game accesses the CD, one could very well be less efficient than the other. A game that streams XA compressed music would be most likely to see a difference between the two formats. I'd be interested to hear if one format is noticeably slower than the other for certain games.