PS6 Could Launch in 2027 as Chip Design Said to Be Complete

Sony will inevitably follow up the PlayStation 5 with its next generation home console at some point. Based on court documents from its US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) trial over the attempt to acquire Activision Blizzard in 2023, Microsoft believes its next-gen Xbox console and Sony's PlayStation 6 will launch in 2028. A new claim, however, advances that timeline, suggesting the PlayStation parent is further along the development cycle for the PS5 successor. The design of the chip that will power the PS6 is reportedly ready, and Sony could begin producing the SoC for testing in late 2025.

PS6 Chip Design Said to Be Ready

The information comes from KeplerL2, a reliable leaker who previously shed light on PS5 Pro specs before the console launched. In several posts on games discussion board NeoGAF, the leaker claimed the PS6's SoC design was complete. According to them, Sony will kick off production on the first batch of chips for testing towards the end of 2025.

“PS6 is design complete and in pre-si validation already, with A0 tapeout scheduled for late this year,” the leaker said on the forum.

“Pre-si validation” — or pre-silicon validation — refers to testing and validating a semiconductor design via computer simulations and virtual modelling before finalising it for physical production. “Tape-out”, on the other hand, refers to the final step in the design process before chips are sent out for fabrication on a wafer.

Responding to another user who asked if the PS6 chip would be an N3 derivative (3nm process) and thus would be unlikely to bring meaningful gains over the PS5 Pro, KeplerL2 further said, “Not necessarily, Zen6 is design complete too and some of it is on N2,” referring to AMD's Zen 6 chip architecture, believed to utilise TSMC's 3nm and 2nm processes and expected to release in 2026.

The leaker also shed light on the PS6's GPU, saying it was “an early fork of gfx13”, referring to what was to become AMD's RDNA 5 graphics, but was later abandoned in favour of “unified” UDNA graphics architecture.

Bear in mind, the PS5 runs on a custom 7 nm AMD Zen 2 CPU designed by AMD and Sony with an integrated RDNA 2 GPU.

PS6 Launch Timeline

Finally, the leaker, responding to a user who speculated that the PS6 could even see a late 2026 launch, suggested that Sony's next console could launch in 2027. “Sony's usual cadence is 2 years from A0 tapeout to console release,” they said. If tape-out is believed to begin by the end of 2025, a late 2027 release for the PS6 seems likely, which puts the launch window a little earlier than what Microsoft expects, according to leaked court documents from its FTC trial.

The timeline falls in line with Sony's previous console generation cycles and release cadence, too. The PS3 was released in November 2006; seven years later, the PS4 arrived in November 2013. And the PS5 launched seven years after that in November 2020. It would thus be a safe bet to say the PS6 could come out sometime around November 2027.

Last year in September, Reuters reported that Intel lost out on the lucrative contract to design and fabricate Sony's PlayStation 6 chip in 2022 to AMD, dealing a significant blow to the US chip giant's contract manufacturing business.