New rumors indicate that Sony and Microsoft have taped out chips for their next-gen consoles, and early details are already leaking. Speculation about these upcoming consoles has circulated for some time regarding their potential launch dates, but little has been said beyond both still committing to using AMD Zen 6 APUs featuring RDNA 5 graphics. Well, the latest rumors are now claiming that each console maker has settled upon chip designs to move forward with manufacturing. The following is from well-known industry info leaker KeplerL2 on the NeoGAF forums (via VideoCardz).
KeplerL2 also stated that Sony’s AMD chip is expected to have 40 TFLOPS of GPU compute power, while the graphics solution for Microsoft’s Project Helix is expected to be 56 TFLOPS, but they emphasize this should not be considered indicative of overall performance ability.
“No, because TFlops is just a measure of FMA throughput. It shouldn’t be “normalized” for another architecture because that’s stupid. I remember people did the same for the PS5 “RDNA TFlops vs GCN TFlops”. It’s just a bad way of measuring things.”
– KeplerL2, NeoGAF
While there is a possibility that either the PlayStation 6 or Xbox Helix may arrive by the end of 2027, it wouldn’t be a complete surprise if they launch in 2028. However, the elephant in the room remains: at what price will they hit store shelves? The ongoing memory and storage shortage has driven prices for DRAM and NAND to record highs, causing component costs to double or triple, leading many to wonder if next-gen consoles will hit the $1,000 barrier. Spec-wise, little else is known so far regarding Project Helix other than that Microsoft could be planning a suite of hardware releases spanning from mobile to traditional consoles and is said to possibly make a device capable of playing PC titles as well. However, VideoCardz does have alleged memory specs for the PlayStation 6, claiming 30 GB of GDDR7 on a 160-bit bus and bandwidth of 640 GB/s. By comparison, the PlayStation 5/5 Pro has 16GB GDDR6 on a 256-bit but with a bandwidth of 448 GB/s / 576 GB/s, respectively.
If accurate that chips for these consoles are taped out, we could probably expect to begin to see more leaks and rumors regarding their specifications and performance revealed in the coming months, but it’s still anyone’s guess when they will launch and for how much.
Discussion (1 reply)
Join Discussion →I am surprised its this soon. I thought for sure another couple years.