Sony’s Next-Gen PlayStation will use AMD Zen 2/Navi chips and be backwards compatible

Sony’s Mark Cerny has spilt the beans on the company’s next-generation PlayStation console, confirming that the console will offer faster loading times than its predecessor, utilise AMD CPU and graphics components and be fully compatible with PlayStation 4 games. 

On top of this, Sony has confirmed that their next-generation PlayStation will utilise AMD’s Zen 2 CPU architecture alongside Radeon Navi graphics, confirming that the PlayStation 5 will support Ray Tracing and utilise a custom AMD chip for enhanced 3D audio. In short, Sony’s PlayStation 5 will offer a considerable boost in CPU and graphics performance over its predecessor, delivering a true generational leap in performance. 

When it comes to storage, it is unknown how Sony plans to deliver the enhanced read/write speeds in an affordable way, as SSDs remain expensive when compared to traditional HDDs. All we know is that Sony’s next-generation PlayStation will load games faster, but how it will accomplish this remains to be seen. Sony claims that their solution will offer more bandwidth than any SSD for PCs today, suggesting a storage solution that’s unlike anything that we have seen before.    

On the CPU-side, Sony’s next PlayStation will offer users eight Zen 2 processing cores, bringing with it considerable increases in per clock performance over the PlayStation 4’s low power Jaguar CPU core. Better still, Zen 2 will likely offer higher clock speeds than the PlayStation 4’s Jaguar-based processor, making it likely that the PlayStation 5 could provide more than a 2x boost in CPU performance. The PlayStation 4’s Jaguar cores run at 1.6GHz, whereas most desktop Ryzen CPUs run at well over 3GHz. 

Cerny also stated that the platform would support 8K, likely through the use of HDMI 2.1, and that the console will retain support for physical media.