Sony's Next-Gen PlayStation will use AMD Zen 2/Navi chips and be backwards compatible

[WYP]

The next PlayStation will support Ray Tracing!



Read more about Sony's next-generation PlayStation hardware.

 

[grec]

Wasn't the PS4 limited to SATAII speeds? Which can sort of just about limit HDD's I guess. Especially if they move to have 8GB of flash or something tacked on, the CPU speed up will also help loading times, I guess it could just be SATA3+ new CPU. 8 cores is cool, I'm guessing there will be SMT too to keep pushing thread counts since some games can really benefit from AMD implementation & the OS especially will. Personally I doubt AMD will be throwing dedicated RT cores into the mix, I'd bet more on a general improvement to concurrent compute, memory addressing, and some extra instructions to get raytracing working well on Navi.

 

[NeverBackDown]

One Zen 1 core has as much power as the entire Jaguar cpu. It'll be a massive increase in performance. Probably the largest jump we've ever seen in a console.

It'll be an expensive console using the latest and greatest tech from AMD.

 

[looz]

I doubt it's going to be a large price hike, scaled down Zen and Navi shouldn't break the bank.


It's nice that industry standard CPUs won't be shockingly bad in the future, though.

 

[NeverBackDown]

It'll probably be back to $500-600 range. Which didn't work out for Xbox very well last time or the PS3. It'll be interesting to see

 

[grec]

Zen has upto x2.5 the IPC of Jaguar I think you'd need to be clocking at like 4.5Ghz+ to get one of them equivalent to 8 in that best case scenario which is abit of a stretch but that'd still be far from the largest jump it's more that the last just was tiny compared to all the previous ones in the CPU department. 6th gen CPUs were supercomputer-derived minimonsters when they launched and jumps before that often came with large paradigm shifts in overall architecture, in fact many developers initially found Cell was outperforming Jaguar for FPU-heavy tasks.

Personally I think the CPU for this will be a chiplet identical to a Ryzen3000 8-core binned for lower leakage/high efficiency with like ~3Ghz clocks at a reasonable cost(Still a massive jump of several times performance gains), by then presumably AMD's mainstream desktop CPU platform will be upto 12 or 16 cores, with unique I/O & possibly unique GPU chiplets.

 

[NeverBackDown]

Don't really care about IPC. Looking at actual performance data when I researched it long ago I came to the conclusion I already stated.

 

[grec]

You won't find any real world data better than that, almost all benchmarks put it at about 2.25x speed up per core per clock while gaming is generally less than that. I'd be interested to see this performance data though.

 

[ImprovizoR]

Full backwards compatibility is great news for early adopters, so they'll be able to price it higher than the PS4.

 

[grec]

The PS4Pro is still selling for not much less than its £349 launch price outside of sales so I think higher than that is likely but I can't see it going too far beyond £400, maybe matching the One X's £449 launch price since that did kinda work out.

 

[NeverBackDown]

You won't find any real world data better than that, almost all benchmarks put it at about 2.25x speed up per core per clock while gaming is generally less than that. I'd be interested to see this performance data though.

Then research it.

Full backwards compatibility is great news for early adopters, so they'll be able to price it higher than the PS4.

It'll be higher even without it really. They know the market won't spend $600. Especially since Xbox will try to undercut them.

 

[WYP]

I doubt it's going to be a large price hike, scaled down Zen and Navi shouldn't break the bank.


It's nice that industry standard CPUs won't be shockingly bad in the future, though.

You say scaled down, but the thing has eight cores...

 

[grec]

Then research it.

From what I have found a desktop Zen1 core is upto about x5 faster at gaming over base 1.6Ghz Jaguar rather than x8 which is why I wondered where/what that figure came from.

 

[NeverBackDown]

You say scaled down, but the thing has eight cores...

He might be referring to clockspeed so the tdp will be scaled down? I guess it depends on how efficient Navi is and the power supply needed.

 

[looz]

You say scaled down, but the thing has eight cores...

I'm expecting 4c/8t, actual 8 cores would be a strange choice for a game console with Zen's IPC. But I mean it's possible.

 

[grec]

The quote direct from Wired's reveal article doesn't seem to leave any degree of ambiguity

The CPU is based on the third generation of AMD’s Ryzen line and contains eight cores of the company’s new 7nm Zen 2 microarchitecture.

I'm not sure using the same tiny 8-core modules as desktops would really be more expensive than custom 4-core chips.

 

[NeverBackDown]

I'm expecting 4c/8t, actual 8 cores would be a strange choice for a game console with Zen's IPC. But I mean it's possible.

Why would it be strange exactly?

 

[NeverBackDown]

Btw Mark I read the Wired article and it pretty much confirms the use of a SSD. You should update the article to reflect that as you basically you say I don't know when we really do know.

 

[ImprovizoR]

They mentioned some kind of specialized SSD. I wonder if that means that users won't be able to replace it with their own.

 

[WYP]

I'm expecting 4c/8t, actual 8 cores would be a strange choice for a game console with Zen's IPC. But I mean it's possible.

It would also be strange for them to reduce their core count this gen. Sony will get a good deal from AMD and they will make sure the chips are clocked low enough to ensure really good yields. Console sell in huge volumes and Sony doesn't need to make much profit on the box.

Btw Mark I read the Wired article and it pretty much confirms the use of a SSD. You should update the article to reflect that as you basically you say I don't know when we really do know.

I know what it says, but all SSD seems insane for a console. What I am getting at is that the storage solution is unlike anything we have seen in a console so far. That said, NAND pricing could continue to get lower and make SSDs seem like a no brainer in 2020.

They mentioned some kind of specialized SSD. I wonder if that means that users won't be able to replace it with their own.

Hard to know, they need to make sure each box contains X performance levels. If devs make games with Sony's SSD in mind, gamers would need to make sure they replace their storage with something that's better. Who knows...