Warning: long post incoming!
First in January a known AMD leaker, APISAK, has found Gonzalo and Ariel, Gonzalo is a gaming APU and has a 8 core CPU clocked at 1.6 GHz base clock and 3.2 GHz boost clock, and the GPU Ariel had 1GHz clock. Also it had an unknown cache size, implying that it uses a different amount of cache, likely cut down. Gonzalo was marked as Engineering Sample 2 and it’s code fit the PlayStation production, also the base clock of 1.6 GHz would make sense for a PlayStation console because it is similar to previous implementation of backwards compatibility with the PS4 Pro. Ariel iGPU has the id 13E9, to my understanding, 13E0 to 13FF are all reserved for Navi 10 LITE.
Later in early April, a Quality Sample version of Gonzalo had leaked, once again by APISAK, this time with a 1.8Ghz GPU clock and updated Ariel id of 13F8, which already sounded very high clock speed. But other than that,it didn’t really tell us much else.
A week later the plans for the next generation PlayStation have been discussed by Mark Cerny for Wired, the proximity of Gonzalo getting updated to the article seemed suspicious indeed.
In the article the following things were confirmed: 8 core zen 2 CPU (Gonzalo also listed 8 core), Navi GPU with ray tracing, specialized audio chip to enable more accurate audio to the world, backwards compatibility with the PS4 generation, and lastly a custom SSD that, according to mark cerny, has a higher raw bandwidth than any SSD on PC. Cerny also said that not only is the read speed important (implying that by high bandwidth he was referring to read), but so is the IO mechanism and the software stack.
In May, AMD has announced their 7nm Zen 2 CPUs, surprise to no one, they are great CPUs for their prices. Also AMD announced their Navi architecture, based on a new RDNA architecture, 25% IPC boost over the previous generation, much more power efficient, etc.
Also in May our own user
gofreak found a patent that details potential improvements to the SSD to lower its latency, improve its bandwidth etc. You can read more in the thread they made for this patent, very interesting stuff:
PS5 - a patent dive into what might be the tech behind Sony's SSD customisations (technical!)
This will be one for people interested in some potentially more technical speculation. I posted in the next-gen speculation thread, but was encouraged to spin it off into its own thread. I did some patent diving to see if I could dig up any likely candidates for what Sony's SSD solution might...
In June AMD NAVI was unveiled as the RX 5700 and the RX 5700XT, 36CU and 40CU GPUs, each with 8GB of GDDR6. These GPUs are based off the 40CU Navi 10 die. It makes sense then that gonzalo is based off a similar die because its GPU is based off the Navi 10LITE die.
Navi launched, its gaming performance had been pretty good, but not incredible,during the launch period IPC tests were made for Navi and it is found out Navi actually has a higher or equal IPC NVidia’s latest architecture, and 39% higher IPC than Polaris (PS4 pro and X1X GPU architecture).
A few weeks ago, a product was found on user benchmark called AMD Flute. It is still no clear what AMD Flute is, but it has the same CPU clocks as Gonzalo, also it mentions that not only it has 8 cores, but 16 threads, and GPU Id of 13F9, or a Navi 10 LITE, which means this is most likely the whole system that has Gonzalo, or what we assumed to be the PlayStation 5 devkit. The CPU did show a lower score Han expected, and what seems to be a quarter of the cache of the normal ryzen 3000 CPU, this is possibly the cause of the lower score. Flute has 16 chips of GDDR6 each of 1GB, seems to be a downclocked version of the 18Gbps memory, it makes sense if the final version uses 8 chips of 2GB instead.
And finally we get to yesterday, where the reliable AMD insider komachi has found out that AMD has accidentally uploaded a lot of data with a public access, in there he found mentions if Oberon and Ariel, he explained he thinks they are the same. Oberon has 3 GPU clocks listed:
Gen 0 with 800MHz clock, gen 1 with 911MHz clock, and gen 2 with 2000MHz, this information is critical. Gen 0 and gen 1 are obviously PS4 and PS4 pro gpu clocks., Which means that without a doubt Oberon is the PS5, and has 2GHz clock. Why would it have those clocks? The reason is this; the PlayStation 5 seems to use a very similar backwards compatibility solution to the PS4 Pro, it will have the same Compute unit count of 36CU, so that to be compatible with the base PS4, you could disable half the compute units and clock the GPU at 800MHz for safe compatibility activate all the compute units and clock at 911MHz for safe PS4 pro compatibility. 36 Compute units clocked at 2000MHz would give us 9.2TF, with 39% higher IPC than Polaris we will get the equivalent of 12.8TF Polaris GPU, or 3x PS4Pro or a little higher than 2X X1X GPU performance. If this is true then Sony has a small but fast GPU, which should help in reducing cost, and also it might have a bit higher performance than a wider but lower clocked GPU due to clocks scaling better than CU count.
Then comes the question: why has the GPU clock increased. This is speculation territory, but, 40CU with 1800MHz would have an equal amount of TF, so maybe until they get the 36CU 2000MHz to work, they gave developers 40CU 1800MHz. Needs to be mentioned that usually console manufacturers uses disables a few compute units, but has been established before, in order to have 44CU with 4 disabled, due to Navi’s design, you would need to waste a lot more space, compared to 40CU with 4 disabled to have 36CU. So it makes more sense going that route.
Komachi has been saying that Oberon is Ariel, so if we connect everything and really Ariel, Gonzalo, Flute and Oberon are all PS5 related code names then we can make a close to final spec list:
Zen 2 CPU with 8 core 16 threads clocked at 3.2GHz, quarter of desktop ryzen 3000 CPU cache.
Navi GPU with 36 compute units clocked at 2GHz = 9.2 TF which roughly equals to 2X X1X or 3x PS4Pro in GPU performance.
16GB GDDR6 with a bandwidth of around 530GB/s I think.
There are 2 question marks left:
Price
SSD size and bandwidth
Phew that was a lot of typing, but I felt like this was necessary at this point.
sigam este caminho.
