It’s that season again. It’s leak season, and the PlayStation 5 leaks are out in full force. The latest round can be attributed to a website known as SemiAccurate, which requires a subscription to the site that costs $1000. With that in mind, take the following “news” with a grain of salt. According to the site’s leaks, the PlayStation 5 will use AMD’s Navi as its base architecture, with a CPU that’s custom Zen. But that’s not the coolest part, not by a long shots. It seems that a “lot” of devkits have apparently gone out for testing. It’s strange that we’re already this far into a proposed dev cycle, but if it’s true and kits have gone out, then we could be closer to a PlayStation 5 than we thought.
The leak also states that a 2018 release isn’t out of the question, with “VR goodies” coming on board at the “silicon level.” A new round of leaks via NDTV also states that a release date of 2020 could end up being the proposed release date for PlayStation 5, or whatever the project ends up being called. That makes a lot more sense than 2018, and it’s not so far off that it’s too early to start talking about it, which is good news for PlayStation fans.
The report states that “sources intimately familiar with the entire situation” claims that AMD’s roadmap for Navi is right on the money when it comes to what Sony has planned for the new PlayStation. The report suggests that AMD could very well be an integral part of the console, stating the following: “According to tech blog Phoronix, Simon Pilgrim is a principal programmer at Sony who has been working on AMD Ryzen microarchitecture support ‘within the LLVM compiler stack.’ LLVM is a CPU compiler used in the PS4 development kit.”
Previously, we’ve seen reports from Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO John Kodera, who’s stated that the PlayStation 4 is already nearing the end of its life cycle. It’s time to start thinking about the next generation of consoles, whether you feel he’s right or not, because the future is coming, and judging from these leaks, it’s going to be here whether you’re ready to experience it or not, so get ready and get those wallets open. It’s going to get messy soon enough.