Sony Teases Next-Gen PlayStation: Custom AMD Chip with Zen 2 CPU & Navi GPU, SSD Too

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After years of speculation about what could be and what Sony may be up to, the company is finally starting to ramp up the long launch cycle for their next-generation PlayStation console. In an exclusive article published this morning via Wired, Sony games guru and system lead system architect Mark Cerny laid out a few tantalizing tidbits about the still unnamed console, offering some basic information on the underlying system architecture while promising that it’s “no mere upgrade.”

The focal point of Wired’s article is, as many AnandTech readers would expect, on the chip at the heart of the system. Cerny and Sony (and AMD) are now confirming that yes, AMD is once again putting the console’s central processor together. The cutting-edge chip will be built on an unnamed 7nm process, and will incorporate all of AMD’s latest technologies. And while neither Cerny nor AMD are going quite so far as to call it an APU – AMD’s favored name for a chip with CPU and GPU cores integrated – it’s clear that this is very much a single chip, and seemingly an APU in everything but name.

Dissecting AMD’s Chip – Zen 2, Navi, and 3D Audio

The big news here of course is that Cerny is confirming that Sony is tapping AMD’s latest CPU and GPU architectures for the next-generation PlayStation’s chip. On the CPU side we’re looking at 8 CPU cores based on AMD’s Zen 2 microarchitecture. This is the same CPU microarchitecture that AMD is expecting to launch in PCs mid-year, with products such as their Ryzen “Matisse” CPU and second-generation EPYC “Rome” processors. While we’re still waiting to see just how well the Zen 2 architecture performs in the real world, it’s succeeding the already very powerful Zen (1) architecture, so everyone has high expectations here and AMD seems eager to deliver on them.

Meanwhile on the GPU side, AMD will be tapping their forthcoming Navi GPU architecture for the chip. Unlike the CPU side, Son and Cerny aren’t saying anything here about the GPU configuration, so there’s little to be said about performance; all of that will come down to how big of a Navi GPU block Sony has asked for. Navi itself is a codename we’ve seen on AMD’s GPU roadmaps since 2016, however we still know relatively little about the architecture beyond the fact that in 2016 at least, AMD was intending to focus on scalability and support for next-generation memory (which at this point we’d take to mean GDDR6). Like the Zen 2 CPU architecture, we’re expecting Navi-powered GPUs to start shipping this year for PCs, so we should have a better idea soon of all of what Navi will entail. 

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