YouTuber Moore’s Law Is Dead has now posted the full leaked specs of the upcoming PlayStation 6 (PS6) console, and they’re even stronger than those in the previous reports. Perhaps the single most impressive spec is the ray tracing one; in August, MLID mentioned a 5-10x uplift from the ray tracing performance of the base PlayStation 5 console. Now, though, he is expecting an even greater 6-12x leap.
The range is obviously significant, but if we took that to mean 12x, it would place the PS6’s ray tracing performance around the level of the current top-of-the-line graphics card from NVIDIA, the GeForce RTX 5090, thus allowing even real-time path tracing in games. Needless to say, it would be a huge surprise, both for a console and for AMD, which is still trailing behind NVIDIA when it comes to ray tracing performance. Granted, there have been rumors from reliable leaker Kepler_L2 that the next-gen AMD architecture will focus mostly on improving ray tracing (and AI) performance. In contrast, PS6 rasterization performance wouldn’t see nearly as much of a boost, according to MLID, who estimates an improvement between 2.5x and 3x compared to PS5.
The PlayStation 6 APU is reportedly going to be a monolithic 280 mm² die manufactured on TSMC’s 3nm process, leading to lower power consumption (estimated to be 160W TDP) compared to the PlayStation 5 Pro that launched last year. The CPU would be powered by 8 Zen 6C cores (7 of which would be fully enabled, while the other is for redundancy) plus 2 Zen 6 low-power cores dedicated to system tasks, while the GPU would be equipped with 54 RDNA 5 Compute Units (although MLID believes two will likely be disabled), clocked between 2.6 and 3 GHz with 10 MB of L2 cache. The PS6 would therefore offer between 34 and 40 TFlops; for comparison, the PS5 and PS5 Pro are known to be 10.28 TFlops and 16.7 TFlops, respectively. As a reminder, the PS4 only had 1.84 TFlops, so in that regard, the PS5 offered a much greater spec improvement. It should be noted that TFlops are a rather outdated way to estimate a system’s power, though.
Rounding up these rumored PlayStation 6 specs, MLID says the memory will feature a 160-bit bus with GDDR7 memory at 640 GB/s bandwidth, supporting up to 40 GB RAM. Sony could choose either 30GB or 40GB RAM, depending on pricing. The report adds that manufacturing should start in the middle of 2027 for a Fall 2027 launch window, which is a little earlier than we expected. Backward compatibility should be maintained with PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 games.
MLID’s video also touches on Xbox Magnus, the codename of the APU that will power Microsoft’s next-generation Xbox console. It is believed to be slightly more powerful (around 25%) but more expensive, both because of the multi-die design and the expected higher power consumption.
If the Fall 2027 launch estimate is correct, we might not have to wait too long to find out if the PS6 specs are indeed accurate. As you might remember, Sony Lead System Architect Mark Cerny started sharing the first tidbits on the upcoming PS5 system in April 2019, around a year and a half before the console’s release on November 12, 2020. Should Sony follow the same pattern, we might get official news as early as next Spring.
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