Possible Sony PlayStation 5 Pro Sketch Surfaces

[btarunr]

This could very well be what the elusive new PlayStation 5 console looks like. DeaLabs illustrated its design as part of its article compiling all rumored tech specs of the console. The console's body retains the essential design of the digital-only variant of PlayStation 5, and its refresh. The disc variant of PlayStation 5 has a crease accent running along its side panels, toward the top one-quarter. The PS5 Pro possibly has more crease accents in its place, possibly even serving as a set of air vents. This is only a 2-color illustration, which means the console could have a unique body color scheme, too.

The PlayStation 5 Pro is being designed for a nearly 2-3 times performance uplift over the original PlayStation 5, and its 6 nm mid-lifecycle refresh. AMD remains the SoC supplier for the PS5 Pro, and its chip is codenamed "Viola." This chip could be built on a more advanced foundry node than even the 6 nm "Oberon Plus" powering the PS5 (refresh). It is a semi-custom chip in the true sense, as it has a unique mix of AMD IP blocks from several generations.



The CPU of "Viola" remains based on the "Zen 2" microarchitecture, and is 8-core/16-thread, with a modest 300 MHz increase in CPU boost clocks to 3.85 GHz. Sony probably finds this CPU sufficient for its needs, and wants to minimize its die footprint when compared to opting for a newer CPU microarchitecture. The GPU is a mix of RDNA 3 and RDNA 4. The shader engines and stream processors in its compute units are based on RDNA 3, while it carries over the advanced ray tracing machinery of RDNA 4.

This could possibly mean two ray accelerators per CU, besides the ray accelerator itself being more specialized (i.e. less of the ray tracing workload is delegated to the shaders). Sony is also increasing the CU count from 36 on the "Oberon" SoC powering the original PS5, to 60. The chip features a 256-bit GDDR6 memory bus, and uses 16 GB of unified memory for both the CPU (system main memory) and iGPU (graphics memory). The memory speed is increased to 18 Gbps from 14 Gbps on the original PS5.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site | Source

 

[ARF]

Sony probably finds this CPU sufficient for its needs, and wants to minimize its die footprint when compared to opting for a newer CPU microarchitecture.

It's the opposite - a newer Zen 5 or Zen 6 version would mean smaller die size, because IPC is increased.
Long gone are the days when Sony helped with innovations, the mighty 3.2 GHz IBM Cell Broadband Engine with 1 PPE and 8 SPEs.

 

[las]

I can't wait to see if their upscaling will match DLSS. Sony did not want to use FSR because it was too inferior and made their own, with a goal of reaching DLSS quality.

Might grab one. Hoping for an all black edition.

 

[ARF]

Might grab one. Hoping for an all black edition.

All white will be cooler to run. Especially in sunlit areas.

 

[las]

All white will be cooler to run. Especially in sunlit areas.

Yeah because I play out in the yard

 

[ARF]

Yeah because I play out in the yard

That's not how it works. The sun shines through east windows before noon, all day long (almost) through south windows, and after noon through west windows.

 

[Vayra86]

That's not how it works. The sun shines through east windows before noon, all day long (almost) through south windows, and after noon through west windows.

Curtain - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I know, I know, its science, can't expect you to realize this exists.

 

[TheDeeGee]

What a surprise, it's a Router!

 

[sephiroth117]

It's the opposite - a newer Zen 5 or Zen 6 version would mean smaller die size, because IPC is increased.
Long gone are the days when Sony helped with innovations, the mighty 3.2 GHz IBM Cell Broadband Engine with 1 PPE and 8 SPEs.

Cell was reportedly horrible to work with and many dev teams like Naughty Dog struggled, a lot.

i do see your point but nowadays, best thing to do would be a custom ARM SoC imho, other custom/new architectures would be too complex and would increase AAA game development cost even more

 

[phints]

Half way to next-gen I can't imagine wanting to buy a "Pro" console. May as well just wait for PS6 which will likely have a Zen 6 X3D chip (8 core class downlocked/UVd to be sub-50W like to fit power budget) and an RDNA4 GPU, probably unified 24GB GDDR7, and a 1TB or so PCIe 5.0 SSD. This mid gen upgrade is silly imo unless you got money to burn, but then may as well get into the much better PC hobby if you do.

 

[Caring1]

Very sketch.

 

[TheDeeGee]

Very sketch.

Much curve.

 

[CosmicWanderer]

An Alienware logo on that wouldn't look out of place.

 

[Event Horizon]

Not a compelling upgrade. I would rather Sony refreshed their store front and policies. Their refund policy is one of the worst in the industry.

 

[k0vasz]

doubt it will have "2-3 times performance", but will probably won't have problem running current AAA games at 60fps

 

[ArcanisGK507]

If the next generation of consoles support all of AMD's current technologies by hardware and come with enough hardware to handle the tasks they're meant to do... these consoles will be beasts...

 

[N/A]

if you can call Radeon RX 7800 XT plus Ryzen 7 3700X without L3 Cache a beast.

 

[ARF]

Cell was reportedly horrible to work with and many dev teams like Naughty Dog struggled, a lot.

i do see your point but nowadays, best thing to do would be a custom ARM SoC imho, other custom/new architectures would be too complex and would increase AAA game development cost even more

Maybe it's good the other way round. To ditch AMD/intel altogether and move the entire PC ecosystem to IBM Cell new gen ?
We all know that x86, and its 64-bit version are horrible, because of the low performance / high power draw.

 

[ArcanisGK507]

if you can call Radeon RX 7800 XT plus Ryzen 7 3700X without L3 Cache a beast.

I say next gen...

 

[trsttte]

If the next generation of consoles support all of AMD's current technologies by hardware and come with enough hardware to handle the tasks they're meant to do... these consoles will be beasts...

Unfortunately games will just use the extra performance and upscalling to spend less time optimizing things

To ditch AMD/intel altogether and move the entire PC ecosystem to IBM Cell new gen ?

Nah, the IBM Cell architecture was surprisingly performance competitive but was horrendous to work with, most games couldn't make use of the performance available because it was just too complicated to use, let alone any random computer application. Microsoft after so many years can't even figure out ARM, no way they would be able to use IBM Cell lol

 

[btarunr]

It's the opposite - a newer Zen 5 or Zen 6 version would mean smaller die size, because IPC is increased.
Long gone are the days when Sony helped with innovations, the mighty 3.2 GHz IBM Cell Broadband Engine with 1 PPE and 8 SPEs.

PlayStation 5 is a walled garden, all its software is optimized for 16 threads. You can't upend this by changing the core counts.

 

[Laurijan]

doubt it will have "2-3 times performance", but will probably won't have problem running current AAA games at 60fps

the CPU is like 10% faster and graphics a bit more and raytracing performance might be the 2-3 times better.

 

[Dr. Dro]

It's the opposite - a newer Zen 5 or Zen 6 version would mean smaller die size, because IPC is increased.
Long gone are the days when Sony helped with innovations, the mighty 3.2 GHz IBM Cell Broadband Engine with 1 PPE and 8 SPEs.

There is no direct correlation between instructions per cycle and die size. If anything, high IPC designs tend to be more complex. Sticking to Zen 2 means that ISA compatibility with existing software can be fully guaranteed (including quirks that developers tend to use when targeting a specific class of hardware), with low costs since it's an earlier generation, functionally obsolete architecture that will meet the needs of the platform. Not entirely unlike Nintendo's choice to use off-the-shelf, already outdated hardware back when the Switch came out.

Thoroughly unrelated to the subject at hand, the Cell BE is a very old design from before manycore processors were an easily achievable and affordable thing. In 2005, a processor that had so many programmable units (even if most of them were in-order and incapable of prediction) simply wasn't a thing anywhere else, regardless of architecture used.

I can't wait to see if their upscaling will match DLSS. Sony did not want to use FSR because it was too inferior and made their own, with a goal of reaching DLSS quality.

Might grab one. Hoping for an all black edition.

It will not. Nothing is going to match DLSS for some time, since Nvidia's expertise in this area far exceeds everyone else's. This deep learning thing is their shtick. Besides, console games will never, ever achieve audiovisual fidelity comparable to a PC's, unless the game itself is not capable of displaying better than it already does on the console.

 

[chrcoluk]

PS5's main problems are its software not hardware (well hardware issues with dodgy expensive controllers that have short warranty), not sure what Sony think the purpose of this pro console is.

 

[las]

It will not. Nothing is going to match DLSS for some time, since Nvidia's expertise in this area far exceeds everyone else's. This deep learning thing is their shtick. Besides, console games will never, ever achieve audiovisual fidelity comparable to a PC's, unless the game itself is not capable of displaying better than it already does on the console.

Probably not matching DLSS but their goal was to beat FSR quality