Sony & AMD are already hard at work on the PS6!

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/sony-has-contracted-amd-for-playstation-6-report-claims/

Sony has contracted AMD to design and fabricate the PlayStation 6’s chip, due to the company’s prioritisation of backwards compatibility, it’s claimed.

According to Reuters sources, AMD landed the contract through a competitive bidding process which took place during 2022, that eliminated others such as Broadcom and Intel.

AMD also created the custom system on a chip (SoC) for PlayStation 5 and the forthcoming PS5 Pro, and according to Reuters, this was a crucial point in Sony’s decision for PlayStation 6.

“Moving from AMD, which made the PlayStation 5 chip, to Intel would have risked backwards compatibility, which was a subject of discussion between Intel and Sony engineers and executives,” the publication claims.

“Ensuring backward compatibility with prior versions of the PlayStation would have been costly and taken engineering resources. Allowing PlayStation users to play games they have purchased for older systems is a feature Sony often includes in a next-generation system.”

Rival chip maker Intel reportedly met with Sony in 2022, including meetings between the two companies’ CEOs, dozens of engineers and executives.

A dispute over how much profit Intel would take from each chip sold blocked it from settling on a price with Sony, it’s claimed.

In response to Reuters’ reporting, an Intel spokesperson said: “We strongly disagree with this characterization but are not going to comment about any current or potential customer conversations.

“We have a very healthy customer pipeline across both our product and foundry business, and we are squarely focused on innovating to meet their needs.”

Oh snap! PS5 Pro is already yesterday news. Who's excited for PS6??

That’s unfortunate. A contract with AMD guarantees the console will underperform.

@SolidGame_basic: Not excited at all. I expect another overpriced console with lack of physical support and no REAL exclusives for years

Sony has lost its touch and lack of competition from MS doesnt help. They became PS3 era arrogant yet again

well, comparing the 7900xtx to the equivalent nvidia card, both are about par. The 4090ti is a step above obviously, because AMD didn't create an equivalent for that segment. Which makes sense, because there simply isn't that many customers who would pay for such a thing for nvidia, let alone AMD. So how is it underperforming agan?

Just another of your takes lol...please tell us all again how MS the 4 trillion company is making a mistake with gamepass.

What SoC would you suggest the next consoles should use?

I really hope Sony doesn't drop physical alltogether next gen.

@ghostofgolden: Graphics are so good at this point, I don't think it matters much. Keeping consistent architecture to ensure backwards compatibility is probably the best move overall.

Intel entering the console space would have been interesting though 🤔

Intel is not a brand I would trust on any computer device. Their current scandal stem from their culture of insane high voltage and BUS frequency for years with high wattage. Faster sure, but no durability. Intel would recall all their 3 year old sold CPUs if they had integrity.

Smart move to stay with AMD.

This is what bothers me about the pro now. How is Sony or MS going to make a console significantly more powerful than the pro, at a $500 price point by 2028?

If Sony didn't release the pro, our expectation could have been more balanced for the next gen.

Will a mid "RX 9000" series GPU significantly beat the shit out of the RX 7800XT?

The PS6 is digital only, so their claims of BC only goes as far as digital games. What about those with physical?

It's supposed to be BC so I doubt it. It also seems early to do this because there haven't been many discussions around family sharing of digital content from console makers.

It’s great to see them keeping backwards compatibility in mind for the PS6. Still a lot more that needs to be revealed about the system though.

It's up to the people to keep supporting it! Sony is tracking those disc drive sales lol.

Since when is it news as soon as a new system is released they are working on the next. It's a good move for amd.

At this point in time I’d be very surprised if the PS6 isn’t digital only.

Less reason to get a Pro now, just wait another couple years.

Good for AMD. I suspect this opinion will go down badly for some but, by and large, MS and Sony and AMD did good with the current consoles given the constraints the console manufacturers work under. I don't think anyone else would have really done any better. The XSX and PS5 are very solid systems.

Sure, we would love more RT performance and, in hidnsight, better AI performance would be good. But the specs for these consoles would have been pretty final in 2019. At the end of the day the GPUs the consoles have were the GPUs Sony and MS asked for.

On a related note, it is interesting to see how AMD are operating now on the GPU front. At this stage their behaviour would suggest that they don't care too much about the PC market (which is unfortunate). They made some good strides with RDNA1 and 2 (the latter basically being a bigger version of the xbox GPU with a bit of extra cache bolted on). Then, with RDNA3, they kinda stopped. They didn't bother improving RT performance much compared to RDNA2. They did add some AI processing capacity but they haven't done anything with it. As far as I know it's still idle silicon on the PC. The multi chip approach also ate quite badly into the efficiency gains they made elsewhere.

This would really suggest that the Sony/MS/Valve etc. contracts are top priority for Radeon rather than trying to beat Nvidia in the PC space. The main focus for RDNA3 was packaging. A very interesting technical challenge in it's own right...but it doesn't come with an inherent benefit on the PC side. However, for consoles, that packaging expertise can be a very big deal. It offers a lot more flexibility in optimising costs as different parts of the SOC can be made using different nodes. Makes a big difference when looking to sell 100million consoles.

So it looks like the AI stuff was added to RDNA 3 for Sonys benefit rather than the PC (maybe it will eventually come good on the PC side with FSR 4). Gives them something to work with for development and they can give feedback. Same with RT. Looks like they are boosting it at the behest of Sony, in this case, because they asked (and, i'm sure, are contributing towards development). It'll be interesting to see by how much they have improved it. Will it be competitive with the similar Nvidia tier or will it just be the amount requested by Sony.

The down side of all this though, on the PC side, is less competition. Essentially no competition at the high end next gen. Things could get pretty grim on the high end GPU side next year. Could be great at the low-mid end though with AMD and (hopefully) Intel at each others throats. Who knows. Maybe Nvidia may scrape something off their boot to throw at that part of the market too. If they can find the time.

@osan0: AMD are good in the energy efficiency department. At one point it was a big deal how many watts the Xbox and PlayStation were consuming, both while under heavy load, idle, and in low power mode for downloading while "off".

Not a lot of PC gaming portables seem to be going with Nvidia. Some are even trying to go with Intel although they may need to improve with power efficiency too. I wonder if 50-series laptops will sound like jet engines, last 30 minutes, and have a 400 watt power adapter with a big barrel connector?

I'm thinking the exact same thing.

That means the PS6 will be as backwards compatible as the OG PS3. lol

OG PS3 supported PS1 + PS2.

PS6 will support PS4 + PS5.

According to the leaked MS documents the new consoles would be coming in 2028, but maybe the reporting around that is wrong.

Yeah these dates will shift around a lot. According to the documents MS was supposed to bring out a new type of controller this year, one to compete with Dualsense. Might've got scrapped actually.

Microsoft is rumoured to be bringing out their next gen console in 2026 so perhaps this is making Sony consider an earlier release date for the PS6.

AMD GPU tech sucks.

And it’s most likely AMD was the lowest bidder. Thats usually the deciding factor with these decisions

I'm betting it will be discless and maybe will have a disk drive add on at an extra cost, MAYBE.

And my fellow gamers if it doesn't have one then your stupid spending habits (buying digital) will create a monopoly for Sony as its marketplace will be the ONLY place to buy games from, and not only will games get more expensive, but they will be priced at full retail price for longer.

Mark my words it's a slippery slope, and one that you won't be able to come back from.

@girlusocrazy: "According to the leaked MS documents the new consoles would be coming in 2028, but maybe the reporting around that is wrong."

I think a lot of RnD is developing contingencies to be flexible in case the need to launch a new console arrives, be it momentum of a current gen starts to drop too much, or maybe to compete with a competitor. I don't assume anything is written in stone. Perhaps Sony will want to wait until they have some first party games to coincide with a new PS6 launch. Maybe for now wait and see what the PS5 Pro can do to move hardware/software. I'm sure such a move will weigh a number of factors. I honestly don't think this gen has the momentum to extend itself as far as the 8th gen, but we'll see.

@lamprey263: It's kind of exciting not knowing what will happen. It could end up just going longer and then introducing a portable version of the current hardware when it gets efficient enough, along with whatever set top box is next, extending the current consoles.

I'm sure it will have a separate disc drive. But after that gen? Really depends on the sales I guess.

Don't be too sure. If we look at this gen Sony and MS offered consoles with no disk drive and Sony's Pro also doesn't come with one, and can only be purchased separately, so Sony has been prepping all this gen for next gens diskless console.

Not only that but Sony is being taken to court by some governments for not allowing retailers to sell game digital codes, so again prepping has been going on for a while now.

MS is well on its way to going all digital themselves, remember their BS excuse to keep the cost of Hellblade 2 down they weren't making the game on disc, utter BS.

So, forget all the SW BS for a second, all digital is what Sony/MS want so they can take 100% of the profits for their own games and 30% for all third parties games.

Mark my words they will both announce their next gen consoles will be all digital and will only roll it back by making a disk drive at an added cost if the blow back is severe, but again I doubt it will be as they have conditioned its suckers to buy digital, and then boom they will have a bigger monopoly than what Steam currently has.

I've been prepping myself by purchasing retro that will lasts me for the rest of my life because I won't buy a digital only console, I bet you can't say the same right?

@last_lap:

@SolidGame_basic: Let me ask you this, if the PS6 is announced as a digital only console and has no disk drive add on, will you still buy it.

Don't dance around the question, a simple YES or NO will suffice.

They better be hard at work on the PS6 because the PS5 Pro is unimpressive.

I’ll just connect my disc drive to it

So, If there is no option to play physical games on the PS6 you will still buy it because you're a fake physical gamer, who will drop his "beliefs" because his overlord says so, got it, just wanted to be clear👍

No chance ps6 will be digital only. why would they screw over people who bought ps4 and ps5 physical games.

@SolidGame_basic: If you have to connect a disc drive in order to play discs on the PS6, then publishers won't print discs anyway. At that point, just stick with the PS5 or PS4 and turn your back on Sony.

Publishers will still release disc games in lower quantities and some will be digital only. They already do this. Disc games are getting phased out. This is the reality. It will be the same thing that happened on PC. You can still buy a disc drive to play your old games, but new games will eventually become digital only.

The day consoles don't have a built in disc drive I'll stop buying them, I'll get a PC dedicated for the living room and couch at that point.

You should already be doing that.

No major publisher will release physical games for a PlayStation 6 without an internal disc drive. Releases would be few and so far between that Sony might as well not make physical playback an option except for previous gen games (with that external disc drive).

They have already released 2 digital consoles (2 once the "pro" releases) and you think there is no chance lol.

You are so entrenched into the Sony cult that you believe Sony wouldn't do such a thing🤦‍♂️

But here's an inbetween Pro version of PS5 first, please buy.

Phony says... Buy the BS Jive Bro for 8 bills now then a couple years later buy our BS6 for 12 bills. ;o

Poo gullible cows. lol :P

@lamprey263:

Latest rumored PS6 release date is 2028 so you’d be waiting more than “a couple years”.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if the mid gen “Pro” cycle continues for the third consecutive generation with a PS6 Pro in 2032.

? ps5 had first party games since launch. god of war,hfw2,spiderman2,miles,ratchet and clank,demon souls,gt7 and more is not enough exclusives? most of them scoring from 8-9.

on top of huge third party exclusives like final fantasy. how much more do you expect of them with competition? competition been so bad for xbox that they have to put there games on a sony system.

499 at launch is overpriced? ps3 launched at 600 2 gens ago.

@SecretPolice said:

Phony says... Buy the BS Jive Bro for 8 bills now then a couple years later buy our BS6 for 12 bills. ;o

Poo gullible cows. lol :P

more options = being milked. I'm not getting the pro because I choose not to. only milked if a game only runs on the pro.

ps6 going to cost just as much as next xbox. that's if xbox makes another system ;)

I doubt there will be a PS6. I am glad MS confirmed the next Xbox.

Doubtful. Not if they can sell you a disk add on for profit.

with sales 3:1 to 4:1 im sure there will be a ps6.

lmao so with amd and sony working on ps6 is not confirming there will be a ps6?