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setsunatenshi said:
Alby_da_Wolf said:

Surely impossible now, very unlikely next year, but how about 2020? Don't forget that only the CPU should provide almost the same computing power also in undocked mode, while the GPU would run at a power considerably lower than in docked mode.  They could even include mobile and PC GPU cores and switch between them, the APU would cost more, but the hybrid model would be obviously priced higher than the base home-only one.
About Sony's will, who knows? Why shouldn't it want to take some portable market share back if it were possible? Obviously this would be viable if the market offered the needed power anyway, investing what's needed to make such devices just for PS5 would be a suicide. Thus it's just matter of launch date, for what regards feasibility. So yes, right now it's abstract reasoning, fantasy if you're just so eager to quickly dismiss it, but if feasibility arrives in time for next gen, why not? BTW it also depends on what Sony will be able to know about MS plans: if they include a hybrid, then it would be very likely that Sony wouldn't want to be the only one left without one. But neither Sony nor MS will let the competitors know it too early, so about this issue it will be a gamble for both, and this, again, makes not just feasibility, but also viability the decisive factors.

2020? still impossible... 

Why? well because the PS5 will be as powerful and as small as it can be and guess what, it will still be inside a box more or less the size of a PS4.

It will be absolutely as small and as power efficient as they can make it and still won't be enough to be a "portable" or "hybrid"

Sony is not chasing after Nintendo. Their customers expect top performance (for the price and console space) and any change to this philosophy would basically give out their market share to PC and whatever Microsoft will come up with next.

Sure the Switch niche is a nice one and I'm all for having a powerful handheld (still love and play my Vita till this day), but there is literally no chance Sony will handicap themselves chasing a fantasy and giving the ground to Microsoft in order to (maybe) make a more powerful switch. That would be Sony shooting themselves in the head.

To sum up, yes I'm quite convinced the leaks so far are probably real, yes we'll have a Ryzen - Navi based APU, we'll probably have GDDR6 and i'm quite convinced it will happen in the holiday of 2019. All depending on AMD having no more delays on their Navi architecture.

This does not mean that a few years later, and depending on Nintendo's continued success with the Switch, they couldn't release some sort of handheld that could basically play the same ps4/5 games on lower settings. This will not be the main PS5 SKU. I'll bet my left nut on it.

Nowhere I wrote that I think there wouldn't be full powered home versions, I definitely think that even taking ALSO the hybrid way, Sony would always offer powerful home-only versions too. As you wrote, and I forgot to mention, a huge factor would be the amount of success NS will enjoy in the longer term, right now it's just too early to say. But you also forget that current gen most powerful consoles, PS4 and XBOne, both use quite lightweight Jaguar CPU cores, so it will be quite easy for 2020 lightweight cores, based on Zen 2 or even Zen 3 architecture, to outperform them by a generation leap-worthy amount.
GPU is not a problem, as lightweight ones would be used only on hybrid units and maybe, with a more Sony-esque approach, even on them only when undocked, while home-consoles and docked hybrids could use beefier GPU cores, not to mention Premium versions that could use even stronger graphics units.
But all this requires time, surely it won't be viable next year even if it became feasible.
This is just a theory of mine, anyway, and it would make sense only in case the market will show that offering a hybrid version will become if not totally necessary, at least beneficial enough.
Maybe I wasn't clear enough before, but I agree with you that even with this strategy Sony should still offer full powered home-consoles too, its typical user base asks for them.



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