It's been a long time coming. The Xbox One and Playstation 4 launched in North America in November 2013. In the six years since, the technology has come a very long way (as it often does in such a time frame). While current-gen games still look and play very good, technology moves ever forward, and recently specs for another engineering sample from an AMD SoC that are likely to power both the next consoles were spotted in the 3DMark database. This would indicate that AMD is approaching production for their chip, and the Playstation 5 and the Xbox One-Two(?) will ramp up the propaganda machines and the next battle in the War will begin. So as always, it's time for rampant (And in my case, excessive) speculation.
So, what info do we have now and what does it mean?
First, let's take a look at the specs of the PS4 and XB1 at launch. Both ran variations of AMD's "Jaguar" APU architecture, with 2 quad-core modules totaling 8 compute cores, clocked at speeds of 1.6 GHz for the PS5 and 1.75GHz for the XB1. GPU clocks for the systems at launch were 800 MHz for the PS4 and 853 MHz for the XB1, and each ran on 8GB of memory. Pro and X models have slightly adjusted clocks and other specs, but by and large all versions of the systems are built around this design. The recent 3DMark specs show a chip that supposedly has a 1.8 GHz clock, which is exciting as it's both more powerful than previous generations and still in development, meaning there could be further increases by the time production models are finalized.
Alright, then... what can we expect?
Well, first things first, it's not exactly crazy to expect both systems to push 4K resolutions out of the gate, a trend I myself grow tired of but am reluctantly accepting as the new norm. It's also fair to expect more power for native streaming encoding. Personally I'm expecting disk drives to go the way of the, well... disk drives on PCs. While more people surveyed (and most people close to me that I've spoken to about it) prefer physical copies to digital downloads, I'm afraid it's only a matter of time before the industry ditches disks just as the music industry has. It would also lower costs dramatically on the console manufacturing end, and almost entirely on the distribution side. What's really exciting here is that the lack of an optical drive inside the system frees up a lot of physical space inside the system. More space for, say, cooling a more powerful APU perhaps? (Well, probably not, but a man can dream, right?) And another way to free up more space? If Sony and Microsoft were to finally ditch 2.5" drives and went with m.2 NVMe SSDs. And, perhaps in my biggest pipe dream of all, maybe Sony can finally integrate a NIC better than a 56k modem.
As long as they still support this bad boy, I'll be A-OK
What worries me, personally, is an inevitable push towards game streaming services, a la PS Now/Stadia. Conceptually it's a neat service, however my personal experience with PS Now having severe input lag and the immeasurable difficulties people in rural areas already face with connectivity, this will have a huge negative impact on a huge section of the market who will rightfully feel ignored. Depending on the weight that consoles put on streaming games, those customers could abandon the games market altogether, and who could blame them? Even someone with decent internet like myself isn't a fan of this model, and Sony has been using it for a while and Microsoft has recently been doubling down on their own game streaming service. If these consoles are geared heavily into streaming opposed to owning your games, a lot of questions about its actual playability will have to be addressed.
When will we know more?
It's tough to say, with Sony pulling out of E3 2019 in favor of a Nintendo Direct-style State of Play event perhaps hinting for a 2020 announcement. What we can say for sure is that the closer we get to production, the more people will know solid facts and that means more facts will inevitably come our way. And we have plenty to look at for expectations if we turn to the PC market, where the bleeding edge of the technology and trends always come from. Let's hope for the sake of all of us (PCMR people included, as competition is always good for the consumer) that this time we get upgrades worthy of the investment, and avoid any more always-on-DRM-esque issues.
I'll be sure to put out any new worthy information as I find it.
Casey is the resident AMD fanboy. Fax him your PSN name to play Destiny sometime.
