PS5 Specifications Confirmed: AMD Ryzen CPU, Radeon Navi GPU, Solid State Drive, and More

The PS5, PlayStation 5, or "next-gen console", as Sony is now calling it, has had its specifications revealed. In conversation with Wired, PS4 systems architect Mark Cerny confirmed that the PS5 will have an AMD Ryzen CPU, Radeon Navi GPU, support for ray tracing, and a solid state drive (SSD) that he touted to be  a "game changer". This comes after an anonymous post from an alleged PS5 developer suggested a similar set of specifications earlier this week. However, with an SSD, we won't be surprised to see a higher price point.

According to Cerny, the PS5 will feature a CPU based on the third-generation of AMD's Ryzen line and contains eight cores of the company's new 7nm Zen 2 microarchitecture. As for the GPU, it would be a custom variant of the AMD Radeon Navi family with ray tracing support to boot. It will be backwards compatible with PS4 games as well.

Though for Cerny, the biggest improvement will be the addition of an SSD which he referred to as "a true game changer" and "the key to the next generation".

"I have an SSD in my laptop, and when I want to change from Excel to Word I can wait 15 seconds," he said while demonstrating load times of Spider-Man on PS4 Pro versus Spider-Man on a PS5 developer kit with the difference being 15 seconds versus 0.8 seconds according to Wired. Furthermore, the game world loaded faster, resulting in a more responsive camera as well.

While Sony isn't giving details on the SSD specifications, Cerny hinted at the possibility of propriety tech at play.

"The raw read speed is important," he said. "But so are the details of the I/O [input-output] mechanisms and the software stack that we put on top of them. I got a PlayStation 4 Pro and then I put in a SSD that cost as much as the PlayStation 4 Pro—it might be one-third faster."

This lines up with previous leaks that have suggested the presence of an SSD or a regular hard drive with "some sort of NAND flash". Though this could also imply a higher price tag with one leaker's claims that the PS5 price would be around $499 (close to Rs. 35,000) and have a release date or March 2020 or November 2020.

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