What do yo think will be the hardware specifications of PS5 if it arrives arround 2019-2020?

[Pemalite]

haxxiy said:

It's very unlikely there'll be more than 40 - 44 CUs on next generation consoles even if the die size is around 400 mm2 and they take I/O out of it.

60 - 80 mm2 will be the Zen CPU which we know the size already. The ray-tracing cores occupy around 180 mm2 in the high-end Turing GPUs. Shrink it to 7 nm and you're talking about 100 - 110 mm2 at the very least. That leaves 210 - 240 mm2 for the GPU - smaller than the 250 mm2 Radeon 5700 chips and their 40 CUs.

Of course, you might opt to severely gimp the ray-tracing cores or take L3 cache out of the Zen CPU, but all of that will come with severe performance costs (such as effectively disabling any meaningful ray-tracing or reducing CPU IPC by 20-30%). Is the trade-off worth it? They've probably studied it far better than we can surmise. But even then, the die space saved wouldn't be enough for the 11 - 14 TFLOPS some people thoughtlessly dream of.

These Radeon cards spit blood above 1600 - 1700 MHz, and we've discussed elsewhere how power consumption influences everything in design, including up to consumer-class product rules and licencing, which are a very significant dealbreaker. Not to mention the costs...

(edit - corrected number of CUs)

Clockspeeds can be tricky, it depends how aggressively they wish to bin things and how hard they wish to dial the voltages home.

If the base Playstation 4 and Xbox One consoles are a gauge though, they went conservative on both clocks and voltages to keep power consumption in check... Because you do have an efficiency curve to abide by... So you are right on the money there.

In saying that, Microsoft took things in the opposite direction with the Xbox One X, they dialed up the clockrates in favour of a smaller and cheaper to manufacture chip. (Plus they mitigated some of the bottlenecks inherent in GCN's design somewhat). - Some of that cost saving was sunk into a more intricate cooling and power delivery system though.

Either way... They will find balance in the force.