Following rumors of Sony introducing its own upscaling technology with the upcoming PlayStation 5 Pro, a plethora of details purportedly describing the hardware of the next-gen console have come to light. The CPU remains the familiar Zen 2 core, and the RAM is slightly faster, but the GPU is being replaced by an entirely new design. And it appears to be a peculiar mix of RDNA 3 and RDNA 4.
The leaks originate from Inside Gaming, and although they are unsubstantiated claims, the details seem credible enough. For instance, it is claimed that the custom AMD APU of the PS5 Pro will retain the same Zen 2-based CPU as the original PlayStation 5. This still means eight cores and 16 threads, which is sufficient for most games.
However, it will not run faster, although there will apparently be an additional operating mode that allows drawing more power to achieve a 10% higher clock frequency. However, this would come at the expense of the GPU, which would receive less power in this mode, but would only experience about 1% of performance loss. Why wouldn’t Sony go for a faster CPU? The answer is simple: backward compatibility. All PS5 games and older games that also run on the platform expect a CPU that runs at a maximum of 3.5 GHz. A too drastic change could mess up a lot of things.
The same goes for system memory. Each PS5 contains 16GB of average-speed GDDR6 RAM that the CPU and GPU share access to. With a speed of 14 Gbps on a 256-bit aggregated memory bus, there is a total of a meager 448 GB/s of bandwidth available. The PS5 Pro will apparently offer 576 GB/s of bandwidth, and assuming the bus width has changed, this equates to a speed of 18 Gbps. To put these numbers into perspective, both the Radeon RX 6800 and RX 7800 XT have 256-bit buses, but the former uses 16 Gbps GDDR6, while the latter uses chips with 19.5 Gbps for 624 GB/s of bandwidth. On paper, this would make the PS5 Pro look particularly attractive, as the RX 7800 XT is no slouch, but this GPU also has 64MB of Level 3 cache (also known as Infinity Cache) to reduce VRAM load. There is no indication that the APU of the PS5 Pro will receive Infinity Cache, as AMD and Sony need to keep the chip as small as possible to keep manufacturing costs low. But since the CPU and GPU use the same memory pool, the bandwidth of 576 GB/s will be heavily utilized. Especially when reading about the alleged changes to the graphics processor.
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