Possible Sony PlayStation 5 Pro Sketch Surfaces

This could very well be what the elusive new PlayStation 5 console looks like. DeaLabs illustrated its design as part of its article compiling all rumored tech specs of the console. The console’s body retains the essential design of the digital-only variant of PlayStation 5, and its refresh. The disc variant of PlayStation 5 has a crease accent running along its side panels, toward the top one-quarter. The PS5 Pro possibly has more crease accents in its place, possibly even serving as a set of air vents. This is only a 2-color illustration, which means the console could have a unique body color scheme, too.

The PlayStation 5 Pro is being designed for a nearly 2-3 times performance uplift over the original PlayStation 5, and its 6 nm mid-lifecycle refresh. AMD remains the SoC supplier for the PS5 Pro, and its chip is codenamed “Viola.” This chip could be built on a more advanced foundry node than even the 6 nm “Oberon Plus” powering the PS5 (refresh). It is a semi-custom chip in the true sense, as it has a unique mix of AMD IP blocks from several generations.

The CPU of “Viola” remains based on the “Zen 2” microarchitecture, and is 8-core/16-thread, with a modest 300 MHz increase in CPU boost clocks to 3.85 GHz. Sony probably finds this CPU sufficient for its needs, and wants to minimize its die footprint when compared to opting for a newer CPU microarchitecture. The GPU is a mix of RDNA 3 and RDNA 4. The shader engines and stream processors in its compute units are based on RDNA 3, while it carries over the advanced ray tracing machinery of RDNA 4.

This could possibly mean two ray accelerators per CU, besides the ray accelerator itself being more specialized (i.e. less of the ray tracing workload is delegated to the shaders). Sony is also increasing the CU count from 36 on the “Oberon” SoC powering the original PS5, to 60. The chip features a 256-bit GDDR6 memory bus, and uses 16 GB of unified memory for both the CPU (system main memory) and iGPU (graphics memory). The memory speed is increased to 18 Gbps from 14 Gbps on the original PS5.