Josh Hendrickson
Today, Sony held a talk to reveal the specifications and hardware details for the upcoming Playstation 5. We learned a lot about the internals—namely, that it will be a powerhouse of speed.
While we still don’t know the exact price and release date (Holiday 2020), we did learn a lot about what drives the PS5. Thanks to a lot of behind the scenes work, the console’s new custom 825 GB SSD hard drive will dramatically decrease load times. Whereas the PS4 can load a single gigabyte of data in twenty seconds, the PS5 will be able to load five gigabytes of data in one second.
The PS5 will run on a custom eight-core AMD Zen 2 CPU clocked at 3.5GHz (variable frequency). To complement the CPU, the console will also have a custom GPU based on AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture hardware that promises 10.28 teraflops and 36 compute units clocked at 2.23GHz.
Rounding that out, Sony plans to load 16 GBs of GDDR6 RAM. And if you need more storage, you can add NVMe SSDs thanks to an included expansion slot.
You’ll also get a 4K Blu-ray drive, which will support disc-based games, but to speed up load times, disc games will copy over to the SSD drive. Sony also announced that the PS5 would be backward compatible with most top-tier PS4 games on day one.
Sony also gave a high-level overview of its 3D audio intentions. The goal is, thanks to a series of head-related transfer function (HRTF) profiles when you wear headphones audio should sound more realistic and like it’s really coming from around your location.
Compared to recently announced Xbox One Series X specs, it would seem the PS5 is less powerful. But it has faster throughput, and at the end of the day, console exclusives are a significant deciding factor in which console you purchase.
And when it comes to exclusives, PlayStation is well ahead of Xbox. Only time will tell how the next console generous shakes out, but for now, we only have paper numbers to compare, and that’s seldom an accurate portrayal of the overall picture.
via Sony
