The Playstation 5 is scheduled to launch in the holiday season of 2020, but as the release date gets ever closer, the rumor mill picks up speed. Earlier this week, a new patent was discovered for an unspecific device.
It wasn’t too much of a stretch to think that this patent could potentially be the next-generation Playstation, despite the design looking very different from a ‘retail’ unit.
According to Matthew Stott who is a Codemasters Senior artist (archive link as his profile is now set to private), and has been in the games industry since 1992, the leak is actually the PS5 development kit.
Now – it is important to remember that if this is accurate (it’s possible Matthew is joking for example), that the retail design of the Playstation 5 might look very different from the dev kit of the PS5.
As the design gets closer to final, several chips might be merged into one, the cooling solution could be adjusted, or even if the devices physical size is the same the plastic casing could look different based on even marketing pressure from within Sony.
The design does look considerably ‘thicker’ and chunkier than other PS5 designs, and there appear to be several USB ports at the front right of the console. To the left of that, there appears to be a blu-ray drive (the slot), as Sony has confirmed the PS5 will still support optical media.
There is also no shortage of ventilation for the system, and if we make the presumption that the protruding ‘V’ shape of the console isn’t just for show but actually contains cooling, then it might also lend additional strength to the rumors we covered a few days ago concerning the PlayStation 5’s GPU clock frequency.
Oberon is said to be clocked at a rather hefty 2GHz, and from what we gather through a mixture of both official info (from Sony) and rumors, is based on a next-generation RDNA (Navi) GPU architecture from AMD. This is combined with an 8-core Zen 2 based CPU and other custom hardware for the system.
The GPU and other hardware in the system has a backwards-compatible mode too so that the clock speed of the hardware (along with other changes such as the Zen 2 cores disabling SMT) when legacy games (PS4 or PS4 Pro) are loaded into the machine. This is an effort by Sony to improve the backwards compatibility with the PS5 with PS4 software to as close to 100 percent as possible.
It isn’t clear yet whether the PS3 and older Playstation consoles will run on the PS5.
With such a large APU running at such a high clock speed, the device will likely generate a lot of heat, even if AMD / Sony used TSMC’s slightly more advanced 7nm+ process. A larger cooling solution helps dissipate heat more effectively, and also requires a less aggressive fan compared to a smaller design.
The Playstation 5 could use some type of custom vapor chamber cooling solution, much like Microsoft employed with the Xbox One X and it’s Scorpio Engine SOC.
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The original patent was discovered by Dutch website LetsGoDigital.org
