After months of anticipation and drips of details, Sony has finally revealed the specifications and hardware details for the PlayStation 5, its next-generation home console that’s planned for release this holiday season.
The PS5 will feature a custom eight-core AMD Zen 2 CPU clocked at 3.5GHz (variable frequency) and a custom GPU based on AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture hardware that promises 10.28 teraflops and 36 compute units clocked at 2.23GHz (also variable frequency).
It’ll also have 16GB of GDDR6 RAM and a custom 825GB SSD that Sony has previously promised will offer super-fast loading times in gameplay, via Eurogamer.
One of the biggest technical updates in the PS5 was already announced last year: a switch to SSD storage for the console’s main hard drive, which Sony says will result in dramatically faster load times.
Spec comparison between PS5 and XSX. #PS5 pic.twitter.com/n3HGaGMtyY
— YourMaster (@eastside49er) March 18, 2020
A previous demo showed Spider-Man loading levels in less than a second on the PS5, compared to the roughly eight seconds it took on a PS4.
PlayStation hardware lead Mark Cerny dove into some of the details about those SSD goals at the announcement. Where it took a PS4 around 20 seconds to load a single gigabyte of data, the goal with the PS5’s SSD was to enable loading five gigabytes of data in a single second.
In a major difference, though, Sony’s CPU and GPU will be running at variable frequencies — where the frequency that the hardware runs at will vary based on CPU and GPU demand (allowing for, say, unused CPU power to be shifted to the GPU, allowing for Sony’s higher maximum speed there).
That does mean that, eventually, when more demanding games do arrive in the coming years, the CPU and GPU won’t always hit those 3.5GHz and 2.23GHz numbers, but Cerny tells Eurogamer that he expects downclocking to be minor when it does happen.