Probably not due for at least another two or three years, the PlayStation 6 is expected to be powered by an AMD chip.
Just a few days ago, Sony released a video designed to confirm the most recent rumors: yes, the Japanese firm is indeed preparing to market the PlayStation 5 Pro, an "intermediate" home console that doesn't yet belong to the tenth generation, but already significantly improves on the power of the ninth generation, the PlayStation 5. This isn't exactly a novelty for Sony, which in the past has regularly updated its consoles to optimize production, and even took the plunge with the PlayStation 4 generation: three years after the release of the PS4, a PS4 Pro boosted the machine's performance, we were then in 2016.
The PlayStation 5 Pro will feature 67% more processing units than the PS5 and 28% faster memory. Sony explains that this will accelerate rendering in games by 45% to make animations much smoother and achieve better rendering for the particularly greedy ray tracing. This PlayStation 5 Pro was presented by Mark Cerny, lead architect on the project, as you can see in the video below. More importantly, the console is due to launch on November 7 for the princely sum of 799 euros, without optical drive.
Today, however, we're not here to talk about this announcement - interesting though it is - of the PlayStation 5 Pro, but about the next model up... the very unofficial PlayStation 6. Of course, we suspect that Sony engineers are already working on the feasibility of such a console, but we have confirmation in the form of this information gleaned from Reuters. In fact, journalists from the news agency explain that they have details of the round-table discussions organized by Sony for the core of the future machine. Several manufacturers were obviously in the running, but Broadcom had already been ruled out some time ago, and now it's Intel's turn: Sony would have preferred AMD's processor offer.
Although it has yet to be officially confirmed, the choice of AMD for the PlayStation 6 should come as no great surprise, given that the American firm is already well known to console manufacturers: AMD is responsible for the processors in Sony's PS4, PS4 Pro and PS5, as well as Microsoft's Xbox One and Xbox Series, Valve's Steam Deck and numerous other portable consoles. For Sony, it's a kind of choice of continuity, whereas the question of backward compatibility with the PS3 and/or PS4 would have been more complicated with an Intel chip. The latter would also have come up against the price issue: whether AMD or Intel, the chip would simply have been designed by the American company and then manufactured by TSMC. It was therefore necessary to agree on fair remuneration for the design company. Reuters reports that Sony and Intel had difficulty finding common ground.
