https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/18/21183181/sony-ps5-playstation-5-specs-details-hardware-processor-8k-ray-tracing Sony in a YouTube stream keynote by PlayStation 5 lead system architect Mark Cerny, detailed the upcoming entertainment system's hardware. There are three key areas where the company has invested heavily in driving forward the platform by "balancing revolutionary and evolutionary" technologies. A key design focus with PlayStation 5 is storage. Cerny elaborated on how past generations of the PlayStation guided game developers' art direction as the low bandwidths and latencies of optical discs and HDDs posed crippling latencies arising out of mechanical seeks, resulting in infinitesimally lower data transfer rates than what the media is capable of in best case scenario (seeking a block of data from its outermost sectors). SSD was the #1 most requested hardware feature by game developers during the development of PS5, and Sony responded with something special.
Each PlayStation 5 ships with a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 SSD with a flash controller that has been designed in-house by Sony. The controller features 12 flash channels, and is capable of at least 5.5 GB/s transfer speeds. When you factor in the exponential gains in access time, Sony expects the SSD to provide a 100x boost in effective storage sub-system performance, resulting in practically no load times.
The secret sauce here is that Sony is using its own protocol instead of NVMe, in supporting 6 data priority tiers versus 2 on NVMe. Each PlayStation 5 ships with an 825 GB SSD, which is expandable using external HDDs over USB, or a selection of third-party M.2 NVMe SSDs certified by Sony. PlayStation 4 games can run directly off your external HDD, but PlayStation 5 games have to be transferred from your HDD to the console's main SSD. Past generations of PlayStation implemented ZLib data compression on Blu-ray and HDD media. PlayStation 5 is implementing Kraken, with hardware-accelerated de-compression via fixed-function hardware built directly into the main SoC.
SoC is where Cerny sounded restrained in what he wanted to disclose. The SoC is a semi-custom chip designed by Sony and AMD, possibly on a 7 nm-class silicon fabrication process. Sony won't specify if it is a monolithic silicon or an MCM, but there are three building-blocks to it: CPU, GPU, and I/O complex. The CPU is based on AMD "Zen 2" x86-64 microarchitecture, and the GPU is based on the company's upcoming RDNA2 graphics architecture.
There are eight "Zen 2" CPU cores, although the company didn't mention if SMT is featured. The maximum CPU clock speed is 3.50 GHz. The GPU is a whole different story from the one on the Xbox Series X Velocity Engine semi-custom chip. Sony decided to go with 36 RDNA2 compute units ticking at up to 2.23 GHz engine clock, compared to 52 compute units running at up to 1.825 GHz on the upcoming Xbox. Sony's GPU ends up with up to 10.3 TFLOPs max compute throughput, compared to Microsoft's 12 TFLOPs.
This is some serious game console gaming machines in my opinion. I am very curious what the pricing of these consoles will start at.