AMD CEO Su Claims Zen 2 And Navi Will Power Sony PlayStation 5 Special Sauce
When Sony releases its PlayStation 5 console in 2020 (or whenever), it will not be edible. We are not expecting it to be, anyway. However, it will contain a "special sauce" whipped up by AMD, in the form of a custom system-on-chip (SoC) based on the company's upcoming Zen 2 CPU and Navi GPU architectures.
AMD is understandably excited about the PS5. The company has a stranglehold on the high-end console market, and major console launches are a bit of a big deal—they only come around once every few years for Sony and Microsoft, in between which are less exciting incremental upgrades, like the PlayStation 4 Slim and Xbox One S.
As we have already covered, the PS5 represents a major advancement in the console's power and capabilities. The inclusion of Zen 2 should give it a sizeable boost in processing power over the PS4's Jaguar cores, Navi is obviously an exciting upgrade, and the use of solid state storage (either in the form of a whole SSD, or a hybrid SSHD solution) should pick up the slack.
What's interesting, though, is the mention of a special sauce.
"What we have done with Sony is really architect something for their application, for their special sauce," AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su told CNBC. "It’s a great honor for us. We’re really excited about what the next generation PlayStation will do."
What exactly is that special sauce Dr. Su speaks of? That is anyone's guess, though real-time ray tracing might be the answer, or at least part of it. Sony confirmed that the PS5 will have ray tracing capabilities courtesy of Navi. That seems to make the most sense in this context, though Dr. Su could be alluding to something entirely different—the PS5 still way off in the distance, and it's a safe bet that there is more to the upcoming console than what has already been revealed.
Graphics obviously play a key role in gaming. As it pertains to Navi, an industry insider recently tweeted that the PS5 devkit sports a GPU that is rated at nearly 13 teraflops of compute performance. He also said there is "tons of ultra fast RAM" at the system's disposal.
It's still early in development, and whatever devkits might be out there are not representative of the final hardware and specs. In lieu of a release way off in the distance, we'll be on the lookout for leaks and rumors that might provide more details on the special sauce Dr. Su is referring to.
