Wednesday, November 21st 2018
AMD 8-core Ryzen APU to Power Sony Playstation 5, Says the Rumor Mill
Sony's announcement of the Playstation team skipping E3 2019 took everyone by surprise aside from a few on Reddit who had paid attention to a thread created the day before. Reddit user RuthenicCookie seemed to know a lot more about Sony's plans for their popular game console for the next few years, as well as game titles supporting this current console generation and the next. Amidst a lot of the tasty rumor bits that should interest console gamers, something more relevant to us directly is the mention of the Playstation 5 to continue using AMD for processing power.
This is a logical move to just about everyone familiar with the industry, and Sony needed to up the CPU horsepower in particular to compete with the XBOX One X and offer a true 4K/60 FPS solution for gaming without framerate drops galore. As such, said redditor shared information saying that the current plans involve an 8-core Ryzen-based processor and an estimated console price point of $500. Sony may well share a teaser about the console next year, with retail availability expected in the holiday season 2020 (two years from now, thus). As such, developer kits are likely already ready meaning the specs are finalized as well. This may mean we will see either the first or second gen Ryzen APUs, and not Ryzen 2 as many may have hoped. No word yet on what Microsoft is cooking in their side of the kitchen, but incremental console updates means we may see a Ryzen 2-powered console sooner than later as well.
Source:
Reddit user RuthenicCookie
This is a logical move to just about everyone familiar with the industry, and Sony needed to up the CPU horsepower in particular to compete with the XBOX One X and offer a true 4K/60 FPS solution for gaming without framerate drops galore. As such, said redditor shared information saying that the current plans involve an 8-core Ryzen-based processor and an estimated console price point of $500. Sony may well share a teaser about the console next year, with retail availability expected in the holiday season 2020 (two years from now, thus). As such, developer kits are likely already ready meaning the specs are finalized as well. This may mean we will see either the first or second gen Ryzen APUs, and not Ryzen 2 as many may have hoped. No word yet on what Microsoft is cooking in their side of the kitchen, but incremental console updates means we may see a Ryzen 2-powered console sooner than later as well.
85 Comments on AMD 8-core Ryzen APU to Power Sony Playstation 5, Says the Rumor Mill
Most console players who think 4k/60 will be the new standard for console games will be disappointed.
On the CPU side, I'm not convinced that it's going to be Ryzen-based. Jaguar consumes less die space and does the job well enough. If it is Ryzen-based, it's likely a lean version of the cores (Jaguar-esque).
it's on 7nm, the jaguar core was rather large when PS4 came out.
Furthermore, if they cut L3 cache it'll be a lot smaller too, when Zen2 launches we will see a common L3 cache for all 8 cores reducing the need for as large L3 cache as it'll be more effecient as cross ccx penalty will be removed. (8-10mb L3 instead of 16mb) or even less as a possibility.
You remove a IF between each CCX further reducing the die space area required.
Also am so glad that Xbox scarlet and PS5 are using x86 architecture. since it is same as PC, porting game to PC will be as easy as pressing a button.It is very interesting when AMD said that their navi architecture was built specifically for the next playstation cause sony greatly funded, and worked closely with AMD to polish it as much as possible. Hell, even VEGA turned into a crippled flop because 2/3 of the radeon technology group engineers where moved to work on navi therefor leaving VEGA development with as little resources which resulted in a very, very disappointing product, which is why RAJA felt complied to leave AMD to work with intel discreet graphics .
The big question is ; since navi is to be used exclusively for play station ( cause sony helped fund it ), i wounder what the next Xbox is going to use ??? more likely go with a Vega APU which will leave it in a severe disadvantage.
But on the other hand, the last games on PS2 and PS3/X360 were pretty damn good-looking when thinking about the hardware.
Consoles will continue employing all sorts of trickery to get their magical numbers. And still sweat hard doing so. The age of overkill hardware in consoles is past history. There is no hardware on any roadmap that has the potential to be a game changer. The game concepts won't be changing, all we see is resolution and IQ going up, along with normal generational increases. None of this prompts a major increase in PC requirements. After all, resolution is still a choice of monitor.
The reality is AMD already has developed a relatively powerful APU with Zen and Vega : 4c/8t + 24 CUs , doubling that and adding even more CUs on 7nm without a significant increase in die space should be achievable.
Edit: www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/no-more-cats-amd-reconsiders-ultra-low-power-cpu-roadmap/That appears to be true to today. We'll have to wait and see what was changed with Zen to accommodate the console market. PS5 will not have more than 8 threads. It will either get there by way of quad core with two threads each or 8 cores with one thread each. The former is more likely.
By 2020 (when the PS5 is supposed to be released), even worse will it be.
I sincerely hope that the next generation consoles uses a decent CPU, which does not cripple the performance like Jaguar does.
I can't find where the exact quote was said (was in a video or on Twitter). Here's the closest I could find: www.destructoid.com/the-Xbox-one-x-has-power-to-spare-even-when-running-forza-at-4K-60fps-441794.phtmlWithout having a debugger attached, you can't know that the CPU is to blame.
Not only that AMD is not developing those gaming consoles chips "for free", but it is covering a big chunk of the development costs needed to keep making new CPU and GPU designs. Without consoles' sales, AMD would be closed today. So I would say that yes, they harvest enough.
Go to the steam hardware GPU charts, you will see nvidia dominate the first 17 positions. AMD comes in the 18th place for the number of people playing on AMD gpu