Just yesterday we saw some very interesting news that Intel was one of the candidates to power Sony’s future console, currently known as the PS6. Both Intel and AMD made it to the finals of the tender to design a new chip for the said console, but in the end Sony eventually chose AMD for three big reasons:

• To ensure easier backward compatibility.
• Due to production costs.
• Due to economic discrepancies regarding the benefits Intel would receive per console sold.

The truth is, it was pretty clear to me that there would be no surprises in this regard. Sony is happy with AMD, It has its reasons, as all the solutions it has incorporated since the launch of the PS4 have worked very well and allowed it to emerge victorious from the last two console wars.

In other words, Sony has no compelling reasons to change. The only option for this to go to another company like Intel was if that company offered it very good deal for her from an economic point of view, and it seems that the chip giant could not meet this requirement.

What Intel can offer at the CPU level to improve a console like the PS6

In addition to the economic question, there is a technological question, which is of course equally important. In order for the Santa Clara giant to have a chance to compete to become the PS6 engine, it has to offer a solution that integrates CPU and GPU, either in the same encapsulation or in the same package, the former being ideal.

In 2022, the date when Intel competed with AMD to become the company responsible for the brains of the PS6, the chip giant had processors on the market. Alder Lake-S configured with Golden Cove cores and Gracemont cores, which were made on the Intel 7 node, but it already had more advanced solutions marked on its roadmap, such as Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake.

Alder Lake-S and Meteor Lake It was not an optimal solution to port to a console like the PS6, not only because of the complexity of the P cores and the space they take up at the silicon level, but also because the E cores of both generations offered too limited performance compared to what AMD could do with customization. their desktop architectures.

However, with Lunar Lake the opposite happens. This generation of processors could have been an ideal candidate to adapt and convert to the PS6 brain because:

• The CPU is manufactured on TSMC’s 3nm node.
• The new Skymont-based E cores introduced by Lunar Lake occupy very little space at the silicon level, are simple, have very high IPC and can operate at relatively high frequencies with very low power consumption and thermal value.
• Using an advanced TSMC node, the success rate per wafer is low and the manufacturing cost would be quite reasonable.

During the official presentation of Lunar Lake, Intel noted that the Skymont cores offer CPI improvement up to 68% over the previous generation, meaning these cores could be more powerful than AMD’s Zen 5c cores and perfectly viable for powering the PS6.

With the Skymont architecture, the Intel team was able to develop its own CPU 8 or more cores maintaining adequate performance for the new generation, as this would represent a very large leap compared to the stripped-down Zen 2 CPUs that the PS5 and PS5 Pro have,filling a very small space at the silicon levelbecause Skymont’s 8-core block is much smaller than Lion Cove’s 4-core block.

With the PS6 not expected to launch until 2028, it’s clear that Intel could develop and use a more advanced architecture than Skymont, but to illustrate this article, I can’t talk about something that doesn’t exist yet, or that hasn’t been officially introduced by the chip giant, because that would be too vague.

What about the GPU, would it be competitive?

Intel Arc Alchemist was already a competitive architecture, despite its problems and shortcomings. During a special event focused on Intel much more interesting and better resolved in every sense.

This new architecture is the one that will be used in Intel’s Lunar Lake integrated GPUs and they will be manufactured on TSMC’s 3nm node. Intel confirmed a performance improvement of up to 50% compared to the previous generation, thanks to various optimizations and improvements introduced at the architectural level and clearly stated that it will have dedicated next-generation hardware.

What I just told you is very important because it means that the GPU that Intel could have brought to the PS6 to accompany the Skymont CPU:

• Next Generation Matrix Disks (XMX) specializing in AI. These can speed up deep learning and inference tasks and are used to shape XeSS’s intelligent rescaling. They could also serve for future intelligent frame generation technology.
• New cores to speed up ray tracinglarger and with a higher level of performance. But that’s not all, every raytracing unit has everything needed to deal with the most advanced raytracing, as they accelerate ray and triangle intersections, collision boxes and have transverse acceleration pipes that work with the raypath.

Intel has already shown with Arc Alchemist that it is above RDNA 2 in ray tracing and also in AI because XeSS offers clearly superior image quality on AMD FSR. With the Xe2 graphics architecture, the chip giant has made a very ambitious commitment not only to raw power, but also to specialization, and it’s clear that this architecture has what it takes to make a big leap over the PS5.

As I told you before, I am talking about more advanced architecture released in the future such as Xe3.

So what would the PS6 be like with an Intel chip?

AI generated image.

If we connect the dots with everything I explained in this article, Intel could have easily designed the chip Skymont 8-core CPU personalized aa Intel Xe2 GPU integrate it into the PS6, assuming that it decided to limit itself to these two architectures and that AMD did not want to wait for its successors to receive a more advanced solution better adapted to the possible launch date of the said console (2028 according to the most reliable rumor).

The CPU would take up a very small portion of the silicon available on the chip and the rest would be reserved for the GPU, which as I said would have dedicated hardware to accelerate both AI and ray tracing. I think a solution of this type would be very competitive and very interesting and would enable a relatively significant generational jump at all levels.

We already know we’ll never see a PS6 with Intel hardware, and AMD hegemony in the console market is likely does not change even in the long term if the Sunnyvale Giant continues to make things right. The only one who dares to remain an exception to the norm is Nintendo, which will repeat the SoC with ARM CPU and NVIDIA GPU with the Nintendo Switch 2.

AI generated cover image.