Sony has already started R&D on the PS5

[beeje13]

John2290 said:

beeje13 said:
Could just be a poor choice of words and it's referring to PS4 as next gen. Although I do believe that they will be doing post mortem of the PS4, looking at what could have been better (raw CPU grunt), looking at performance targets for the next console (E.G 500GB/s memory bandwidth), looking at potential technologies (E.G. SSDs, HBM memory).

It's still so early though, i mean the hardware that will go into the ps5 is most likely still in R&D itself. Do you reckon they work with companies as they are developing the hardware? That would make since right since those manufacturers would profit hughly themselves.

For the PS3 for example they worked with Toshiba (and IBM I think) to make a new CPU, the Cell. PS4 was different as in they used existing technologies. It was actually only around 2 years before launch that they changed from a 4 core 3.2 GHz Bulldozer (AMD Desktop) to the 8 core 1.6GHz Jaguar (AMD Laptop/tablet). That was probably because Bulldozer was not quite as good as expected, so not significantly better (it might have been worse even) than the low power Jaguar, clock-for-clock. Jaguars are not designed to operate anywhere near 3.2GHz so I hope you see the logical option of the 8 core 1.6GHz which we have now.

I think you are definitely right when you say that some of the hardware for the PS5 is not released yet and is very much in development.

I think we could see the ZEN line of AMD chips in (some or all of) the next consoles. They are a significant leap over their Bulldozer predecessors and power consumption should be better. Maybe an 8 core 3.2GHz chip which could carry a 3x increase over PS4/X1/CELL. 

While I'm here, i'll also predict:

16GB fast unified RAM, giving 400-600GB/s bandwidth (enough for 4K60)

4-5 Tflop GPU (again, enough for 4K60)

All in a neat package that runs around 150w at full load.