PlayStation 5: when can Sony truly deliver a generational leap in power?
Rumours and whispers are evolving into stories on major sites, website Semiaccurate is offering top-tier subscriber-level access to what it says are early specs, while unverified leaks and elaborate fakes are starting to hit game forum ResetEra. While PlayStation 5 is indeed in development, firm details on the hardware are obviously limited - we are some way off release, after all. But Sony, and indeed Microsoft, operate within a world of existing technologies available to multiple vendors, and we can offer a good idea of the challenges and possibilities available to the platform holders - not to mention when a new machine may become viable. And there's also a big question we can perhaps address - the extent to which an actual generational leap is possible.
Let's begin with timing. What we do know is that Mark Cerny has once again been hitting the road, talking to developers about their needs for the next-gen PlayStation. But in terms of when an actual retail console is likely to be delivered, there are two crucial technological hurdles that need to be cleared before production of a final unit can begin: that'll be the availability of a smaller, denser process for manufacturing the system's main processor, plus the necessity for newer, faster memory. In both cases, 2019 looks like the earliest possible time a generational leap in console power can be delivered, but other factors - system build cost, for example - may set that back further.
It starts at the transistor level. The 16nm FinFET production process from Taiwanese chip manufacturing giant TSMC is currently used by all of the console manufacturers and while competitors are available (and have been used in the last-gen era), the hot candidate for the process used by PlayStation 5 and the next-gen Xbox will be TSMC's upcoming 7nm FinFET technology. Mobile devices will likely first dibs on the process, and it seems that Huawei may have the first full production run. Typically it requires at least a year for a new process to achieve the kind of efficiency needed to make console production possible, which again makes 2019 the earliest conceivable time for a viable console theoretically capable of delivering a substantial leap in power.
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