Sony could be planning to release a slimmer version of its next-gen console, the PlayStation 5, in as little as two years. The speculation stems from Red Gaming Tech owner Paul Eccleston, who was told by one of his sources at AMD that Sony has already booked some of TSMC’s highly desirable 5-nanometer capacity for 2023. Eccleston theorized that this is most likely for a PS5 Slim, as the performance leap between TSMC’s 7 nm and 5 nm processes doesn’t seem significant enough to warrant the plausibility of a PlayStation 5 Pro.
“[…] I was told that Sony have booked time with TSMC from 2023 for their 5 nm fab, and if you look at the performance jump from the 7 nm node to the 5 nm node, it’s not vast,” Eccleston said in a recent video. “It’s not like what we saw with 14 nm to 7 nm, so yes, it’s better, but it’s certainly not enough, at least in my personal opinion, to shift to a PlayStation 5 Pro. For them to do that, they would need to radically increase the amount of GPU performance.”
“[…] they could technically do it if they wanted to go with a larger die. The Xbox die, for example, is larger than Sony’s, so maybe Sony could do it in that respect. I was also told that Sony had booked time with AMD’s custom solution team, and obviously that team, as the name would imply, are [the ones who] customize silicon down to a client’s needs. […] this is going to be integral if they are going to be changing the SoC for a different variant of the PlayStation.”
Sony’s inevitable revision of the PS5 will presumably feature a far more streamlined design than the current system, which has been criticized for its extensive footprint. One of the biggest challenges that engineers will probably face is finding a smaller but equally efficient replacement for the large, 120-millimeter fan that takes up a bulk of the console.