Sony registered the PlayStation 6 trademark in 2019, a clear indicator that it has been working on the PS6, its next-gen console and successor to the PS5, for some time. We also know that Mark Cerny is once again leading the development of this console and that he will recur as lead hardware engineer. He already dealt with PS4 and PS5 back then, so he has plenty of experience.

His role is very important because he will be the one to take care select the hardware configuration which will mount the console and ensure that said configuration is viable in terms of performance, power consumption and temperature, as well as cost.

Designing a powerful console is relatively easy, but designing a console with a good balance between performance, cost and temperature It’s much more complicated than that. Here, the knowledge of the engineering team behind the design of the console at the hardware level, as well as agreements with key companies to achieve customized or partially customized solutions, play a role.

Opting for a very powerful hardware configuration may seem ideal, but in reality it will most likely backfire as it makes the console much more expensive and therefore ends up its sales price is skyrocketing. It could also cause internal problems due to consumption and temperature issues.

The Japanese company hasn’t released official details about the PS6, but I have a pretty good idea of ​​what we can expect from the console. I know this is getting a lot of interest so I wanted to create this special article to share with you everything i think i know about ps6based on fairly reliable information and rumors as well as my own knowledge.

PS6 will not leave the physical format

It is still too early to absolutely limit the launch of the console generation to digital format, not only from a functional point of view, but also because for Sony, selling games in physical format is It is still a very profitable business. This is very strange because with Microsoft it is exactly the opposite.

Some rumors even said that the PS6 would be an all-digital console and that it would not have an optical drive. I believe it will be the other way around and Sony will launch two different versions like the current generation, one with an optical drive and the other without said drive. This will also allow you to reach a larger number of users because a model without an optical drive will be cheaper.

Discs will continue to be an important part of the PS6 ecosystem, and that won’t change during this generation’s lifecycle. This format too It is ideal for consoles, especially because it allows for a simpler and more comfortable user experience, as it avoids downloading tens of gigabytes and allows us to start playing without a long wait.

I know it’s very likely that the digital format will eventually impose itself on the physical format, but the world is not ready yet for a new generation of fully digital consoles. Maybe within a few generations we’ll actually start to see a full transition in favor of this format, but that’s still many years away.

PS6 will again use AMD APU: monolithic or chiplet?

An APU with monolithic silicon-level design

Sony used its own AMD APU in the PS5 with a monolithic design. This integrates the CPU and GPU into the same package, meaning both components share a silicon chip, TDP and cooling system. This solution has important advantages because simplifies design and reduces production costs.

Sony will most likely fit an AMD APU to the PS6 again, although I doubt they will whether to keep a monolithic core design or whether it will opt for a multi-chip design like the one we’ve seen in Sunnyvale’s high-end APUs.

Choose a monolithic core design it would be the easiest and the cheapest, but choosing a multichiplet approach would also have important advantages, among which we can highlight:

• Allows CPU and GPU chiplets to be distinguished and used different nodes for each chiplet.
• The CPU chips would have more space at the silicon level and that would make this possible increase the amount of L3 cache.
• The GPU chip would also have more space at the silicon level, allowing AMD to integrate a much more powerful model.

Chiplet solutions are easier scaling and customization. They also tend to have a higher on-wafer success rate and are much easier to adapt to more advanced nodes. They are also at a good level in terms of cost, so I think Sony will have their eyes on an APU of this type for the PS6.

Sony will again trust AMD due to the good results it achieved with PS4 and PS5 and also due to backward compatibility issueand reusing AMD CPUs and GPUs will make it much easier to keep the PS6 backwards compatible with previous systems and less costly for Sony.

What architecture will the PS6 use?

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In order to answer this question, it is necessary to first talk about its release date. Nothing is confirmed, but it looks like the PS6 will hit the market in 2028. This makes sense, as the PS5 Pro is set to launch later this year, and Sony should give it at least a four-year margin before launching the next console.

The PS5 will hit the market at the end of 2020, the date when AMD has already launched Zen 3 and RDNA 2 has yet to be officially announced. This gives us very interesting clues about the strategy that Sony could follow with the PS6. If we connect all the dots, we see that:

• PS5 uses architecture Zen 2 at the CPU level, even though Zen 3 was already available. This is because Sony prioritized the GPU.
• This console had a RDNA 2 based GPU (albeit with some limitations), an architecture that was AMD’s most advanced at its launch.

The PS6 will follow the same approach, once again prioritizing the GPU over the CPU to make its console the most powerful in gaming. By this I mean that it is very likely that the processor of the said console is a generation behind what AMD has on the market in 2028and that your graphics card uses the same architecture that is available in that year.

If AMD maintains the development cycles of new CPU and GPU architectures every two yearswhich seems very likely to me, the PS6 will use a processor based on Zen 5 or Zen 6 at best and architecture-based GPU RDNA 6. It’s too early to talk about the cores and dive into their specific specs, but I don’t think we’ll see a big increase in cores and threads over the current generation.

Memory and storage: unified design

The unified memory design proved to be the most powerful in the console. Sony learned its lesson with the PS3, the last of its systems distinguishes between RAM and VRAM, with 256 MB available in each block, while the Xbox 360 had 512 MB of unified memory.

For the PS4, he opted for a unified memory design that added a total of 8GB of GDDR5 on a 256-bit bus, and for the PS5, he used the same design but with 16GB of GDDR6 memory that also worked on a 256-bit bus. . Sony doubled the total amount of memoryand also increased bandwidth.

Because it is a unified memory, it is shared CPU and GPU, and is also used to store basic elements of the operating system and its applications. This is why the PS4 only had 5 GB of free space for games and all indications are that the PS5 has about 13.5 GB of free memory for games. We can expect this to happen again with the PS6, although it’s still unclear how much memory it will have and what type.

Overall, I’m inclined to think that the PS6 is most likely to mount between 24 GB and 32 GB of unified memory, because these are numbers that would be optimal in terms of cost and performance and would allow for a significant generational leap. I’m pretty sure that said memory will be of the GDDR7 type and that it will communicate with the CPU and GPU via a 256-bit bus.

A PS6 with 28 Gbps GDDR7 memory and a 256-bit bus should have a bandwidth 896 GB/s, twice the bandwidth of the PS5, which only reaches 448 GB/s.

As for storage, it’s clear that Sony will once again mount the unit SSD. It will offer very high performance and will be supported dedicated hardware completely freeing the rest of the components from core tasks that can be a burden, such as asset decompression. This unit should have a minimum capacity between 1TB and 2TB.

Performance: what can we expect from this console?

The PS6 will be configured with a very advanced next-generation CPU and GPU, which means it will be better prepared for work with graphics engines, which are extremely demanding todaysuch as Unreal Engine 5. This graphics engine is complex and advanced, causing performance issues even with powerful graphics cards such as the GeForce RTX 4090.

Its CPU will offer higher IPC and may have more multithreading capacity, so we can expect more optimization in games at the level of multi-threaded CPU usage and we can meet characters and NPCs with better animationsphysics and more sophisticated AI systems.

Increasing the amount of available unified memory should also enable creation games with larger worlds rich in detail, and a high-performance SSD will reduce loading times and perform most of these processes in the background, without interruption, improving the realism and experience of open-world titles.

The new PS6 GPU should also give us a lot of joy. If you end up using a model based on RDNA 6, it will have that 5th generation cores to accelerate ray tracing, and it could come with fourth generation cores specialized for AI. Ray tracing is perhaps finally within reach of the mentioned console while maintaining a decent resolution and fluidity, but in this sense we have to be careful, as we are talking about a very demanding technology in the end.

You must have seen the rumors saying that the PS6 will be an 8K console, but apparently It has no head or tail. The PS5 already has trouble running Unreal Engine 5 at 1440p with settings like Lumen and Nanite enabled, so no, the PS6 won’t be able to run games with those settings and the graphics engine at 8K.

When we talk about 8K resolution, we mean more than 33 million pixels on the screen real madness, which is impossible with such an advanced graphics engine as Unreal Engine 5. I believe that the PS6 will be a 4K console under the said graphics engine, but we must remember that at the time of its launch, Unreal Engine 6 may be already available and that this graphics engine will set a new tech cap and a new level of demand.

In terms of performance, both the PS4 and PS5 came on the market equipped with GPUs that, thanks to the specifications They were equivalent to a mid-range graphics card moment. I’m confident that the same will happen with the PS6, and that in terms of raw performance it will be on par with a mid-range gaming PC of the year it’s released.

Release date and possible price

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As I said before, everything points to this The launch of the PS6 will take place in 2028, though I’ve seen some sources say we could see it in 2027 or even 2026. That seems unlikely to me, especially since it would keep the PS5 Pro as a top-of-the-line option for just two years.

There are many theories about the launch price. Personally, I’m inclined to think that it will be priced in between 500 and 600 dollars. If it ends up arriving in two versions, one without the optical drive and the other with said drive, the prices should be set as follows:

• PS6 with optical drive: between $500 and $600.
• PS6 without optical drive: between $400 and $500.

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