The Chief architect revealed PS5’s hardware secrets
Sony PlayStation 5 is a familiar device for many gamers, with a charming and unique hardware system. Since it was released a year ago, it has been in hot sales.
PlayStation 5 core part uses AMD custom SoC code-named Oberon, which has eight Zen 2 architecture CPUs with a frequency of 3.5 GHz, and RDNA 2 architecture GPUs with a frequency of 2.23 GHz, L3 cache is 12MB, floating-point computing performance reaches 10.28 TFLOPS, supports 4K@120Hz and 8K video output, manufactured by TSMC’s 7nm process. The storage system of PlayStation 5 is also very interesting. The built-in SSD capacity is 825GB, and the read speed reaches 5.5GB/s (8-9GB/s when compressed). In addition, PlayStation 5 also provides a PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slot, which is convenient for players to expand storage capacity.
Recently, PlayStation 5 chief architect Mark Cerny talked about many design details of PlayStation 5 in a new video of Wired, including GPU, controller, 3D audio, etc. At the same time, he also talked about some interesting things, such as the storage system of PlayStation 5, which is already one of the core functions of this game console. “We’d been getting requests for an SSD all the way back to PlayStation 4. In particular, Tim Sweeney, who is the visionary founder of Epic Games, he said ‘hard drives were holding the industry back’”, Cerny reveals.
“We also need to insulate the games from the new PlayStation 5 capabilities. There was a case early on where we ran a multi-million selling PlayStation 4 game on PlayStation 5 and found out that the player character was suddenly just running too fast. What was happening was the power of PlayStation 5 was translating into higher frame-rate and it broke gameplay. So to fix that bug we had to put in knobs that would allow us to dial-in just how much performance that game could handle.”
Mark Cerny also talked about other storage-related issues, including PlayStation 5’s special data compression technology, which allows game developers to reduce the file size of PlayStation 5.
