It’s Beginning To Look Like The PlayStation 5 Could Feature AMD’s Ryzen

This isn’t likely to come as a surprise to anyone who follows the console market, given the fact that AMD silicon is currently featured in both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, but we’re beginning to see hints that AMD’s Zen microarchitecture is going to wind up in Sony’s next major console.

Our friends over at Phoronix were keen to spot this one. It appears that Sony’s principal programmer at SCE Europe has been submitting code cleanups for Zen-related code in the LLVM compiler, and since his job directly targets PlayStation hardware (including Vita), it’s not hard to put 2 and 2 together.

Sony’s 3-blade PlayStation razor

This is so early days, that we can’t treat this new information as anything other than speculation. We don’t know when the PlayStation 5 will arrive, and in reality, it could be so far out that Zen 2 will grace its underbelly, not the current Zen found across the entire Ryzen, Threadripper, and EPYC lines.

That all said, AMD has made great strides on the CPU front even since the release of the PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox One X. Given the current on-chip RX Vega solutions available right now, it doesn’t really seem likely to me that those are going to be used in their verbatim state, because they’re already underwhelming in performance compared to the 4 TFLOPS PS4 (versus 2400G’s ~1.7 TFLOPS) or the 6 TFLOPS Xbox One X.

Still, even if the RX Vega IGP isn’t used, the CPU improvements on their own would be immense. We’re not talking only about IPC performance boosts, but core boosts as well. AMD’s Zen-based chips are also more power-efficient than ever, so it seems possible that by the time a PS5 gets here, it could very well use less power than the PS4 Pro or Xbox One X.

Again, we’re still so far out, speculating right now doesn’t hold much use, except for the fact that it’s fun to gauge what could happen. Whatever happens, I half-expect to see both Microsoft and Sony continue to leap-frog each other, ultimately putting one ahead of the pack on the performance front.