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haxxiy on 31 July 2019
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Alby_da_Wolf said:
haxxiy said:

You have it the other way around. The Jaguar CPUs could easily fit into a tablet or even a portable... they were actually designed for it. But the GPU, even if we are talking about playing the same games at a lower resolution (which would demand they are all individually patched) and using AMD's newer architectures and manufacturing processes, this is some 15 - 20 Watts here (being very optimistic here). That's the GPU alone, and twice as much as the power consumption of an average tablet SoC. Not feasible unless you want batteries lasting less than an hour of gameplay, and possibily overheating hardware.

The Jaguar could easily fit now, some years later. Settling on a custom Zen 2 for PS5 base model, Zen 3 or later will allow the same, hopefully not too late, if the original custom Zen 2 isn't too powerful. But for the GPU things changed on many fronts: current gen consoles, plus slow PC HW market (PC games are thriving because PCs last long and so the install base, already large, is growing anyway, but PC HW market isn't thriving at all) kept minimum specs stable at a very reasonable level for a long time, and now Switch too arrived, so any games able to scale down to undocked NS GPU power, won't have any problem to scale down to a far more powerful undocked hybrid PS5 GPU, while most games that won't be able to scale down to undocked NS, will probably be able to do it to undocked PS5, maybe with some tweaks. A stable minimum reference HW power on both x86 consoles and PC actually changed the game, and even more did it the fact that on the small screen of a portable, time has come when further increases in GPU power give less and less noticeable improvements, compared with current portable GPUs, a next gen portable, or undocked hybrid could need just a little better FX and higher framerate, totally feasible at a nice price and low power consumption if a hybrid will have to wait for portable Zen 3 or later CPU anyway.
Most probably the GPU power difference between docked and undocked will be large enough that either the hybrid will need to switch between two different GPUs or the docked hybrid will have a GPU power quite higher than undocked, but anyway noticeably lower than the home-only version.
Anyhow, we talk about a very wide range of GPU scalability, so a hybrid version must be planned in time if they want it to be viable and not a blood bath.

Wait, so now you want a PS5 portable like the Switch, am I understanding this right?

Not happening anytime soon... it's possible couldn't even be physically possible. The (undocked) Switch is a mobile GPU from 2015 running running at 160 MHz, consuming no more than 4 - 5 Watts. The PS5 will likely have a GPU around 120 - 150 Watts. The power consumption improvements from node to node continue to diminish and that's already factoring in the fact these chips have considerably lower transistor densities than the node would theoretically allow (meaning leakage is a significant issue even at standard temperatures, so these chips need better electron flow).

That's a 30x gap in power consumption which can't be solved by any amount of underclocking, lower resolution and upcoming nodes / architectures. Certainly not in the scale of a console generation or two, at least. As you mention, of course, a more advanced portable console than the Switch, with its own SoC could potentially receive dowgraded ports from the next generation as the Switch received ports this generation. But I don't see Sony indulging in such adventure considering its costs. Specially when streaming from either console or server to a portable screen will be a feasible, "good enough" alternative solution.