CoinTelegraph has clarified that those rumors going around about the PlayStation 5 being able to mine cryptocurrency are false. This is pretty clear based on a screenshot supplied by the Chinese software developer who claims to have accomplished mining Ether on a PS5, Yifan Gu, as it includes a QR code on the bottom left saying “There is no such software,” followed by laughing.
Gadget review site GizChina, one of the original sites that circulated the rumor, reported that the PS5 featured a hash rate of 98.76 MH/s and total power consumption of only 211 W, which made the console seem like an extremely attractive option for mining. People should remember that PlayStation consoles are notoriously difficult to hack, however (at one point Sony even offered a bounty for people to hack the PS4). All this prank did was play upon the fears gamers who wanted to get their hands on a PS5.
Sony switched to a slightly more PC-like architecture when they moved to x86 AMD SoCs with the PS4, so it is possible that someone could become familiar enough with the console to turn it into a mining machine. The console’s custom AMD Ryzen CPU doesn’t seem to have the chops for these numbers, however. The PS5 features a Zen 2-based 8C/ 16T 3.5 GHz processor and a custom Radeon RNDA 2 GPU @ 2.23 GHz.
The GPU with the closest hash rate is NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3080, which has a potential hash rate of 97 MH/s and a TDP of around 220 to 250 watts when tuned for mining. If you were to include the rest of the specs for a system, the total power draw would likely be closer to 300 watts. In comparison, the AMD Radeon 5700 XT and AMD Radeon RX 6800 might get around 50 MH/s and 60 MH/s, respectively. Even if someone were to successfully turn the PS5 into a mining machine, it’s virtually impossible for it to achieve such hash rates.