Well, I don’t know about the rest of you out there but when I woke up this morning (I wasn’t expecting that to happen by an earthquake btw) I was excited to finally see the curtain lifted on the PS5. What we actually got was less a presentation meant for consumers and more an interesting pitch intended for developers. Not to mention we saw no console or controller. Now granted the name of the stream ended up being called the Road to PS5 so I guess I should have hampered my own expectations. Anyways despite the lackluster presentation, some key pieces about Sony’s next PlayStation did finally come to light! The details were scattered few and far between during the hour-plus presentation but now we know the following.
CPU: 8x Zen 2 Cores at 3.5GHz (variable frequency)
GPU: 10.28 TFLOPs, 36 CUs at 2.23GHz (variable frequency)
GPU Architecture: Custom RDNA 2
Memory/Interface: 16GB GDDR6/256-bit
Memory Bandwidth: 448GB/s
Internal Storage: Custom 825GB SSD
IO Throughput: 5.5GB/s (Raw), Typical 8-9GB/s (Compressed)
Expandable Storage: NVMe SSD Slot
External Storage: USB HDD Support
Optical Drive: 4K UHD Blu-ray Drive
Now there is still a lot about these specs we don’t know like if the CPU with include just 8 or 16 threads. We also don’t know how RAM will be divided up between the OS and games. Again, we also didn’t get shown a freaking box or controller! At least during the PS4 reveal we got a controller… Anyways, The SSD speeds are absolutely ludicrous in the PS5 and it will be fascinating to see how that affects overall system performance. Sony’s approach to frequencies is also pretty awesome as the system should hopefully never have to worry about throttling and fan noise should be accounting for those workloads so no more PS4 Pro jets!
For those out there who want to judge next-gen based purely on specs, this one won’t be as simple to call as current-gen has been. While Microsoft has decided to move forward in a more traditional PC style approach, The PS5 is much more customized. It will be a ride to see how these two different styles of console development play out over the course of the next few years. I am also wondering if we will see the rumored lower end machines make an appearance before launch. But for now, I guess the only thing to wait on is the actual “reveal” of the console!
