PlayStation has long been an iconic brand in the games industry. From the early and strange story of a failed collaboration with Nintendo, the Japanese tech giant Sony has built a mega-brand capable of shaping the future of the games industry. That future has been pretty murky after the current crop of consoles though, with the iterative process that birthed the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X, gamers were wondering exactly what’s coming. And now, we might actually have a slightly clearer picture. The speculation has certainly come a long way from the patent uncovered that confirmed the existence of the new games platform.
Leaks have been a pretty common thing these days in the video games industry. We’ve seen a bunch of leaks and speculation surrounding the next generation of games consoles, among so many other things. For example, we know the PS5 will have a full suite of backwards compatibility features to support PS4 games. The newest leak shows some apparently real images of a dev kit for the PS5, which is apparently circulating on Twitter — here’s what it looks like.
Image Source: Twitter via LetsGoDigital
Dev kits are a bit of a mystery to some, as they’re often not intended to be a full representation of the consumer grade experience of a console. And this new image definitely looks nothing like one would see on a store shelf. Often, these specialized tools have features unlocked or added that aren’t in retail models, so basing assumptions upon leaks, themselves seemingly based on hearsay, can be pretty shaky. But in this case, the information that’s being reported across the web today is based on a combination of factors, most notably older information and leaks from various codenamed projects, namely codenames Gonzalo, Oberon, and Prospero.
As shared by Digital Foundry at the latest EGX event (thanks, WCCFTech), the PS5 SoC codenames Gonzalo, Oberon, and Prospero that have been around for a while are real, and this means that all the information that has floated across the internet until now could be almost entirely accurate. And based on this reveal, it’s been all but confirmed that CPU clock speed for the PS5 will sit around 3.2 GHz. The processor is likely billed accurately as having 8 physical cores with 16 total processing threads. This will be joined with the Gonzalo APU dedicated to graphical processing. This new APU setup is suspected to have four times more power in comparison with the base PlayStation 4 model. This may lend credence to earlier claims that the PS5 will be more powerful than the next generation Xbox.
I will say, based on the early mockups, the PS5 is definitely a visual departure from the sleek and often understated look of consoles in the last couple of generations. The new look reminds me a fair bit of those fan-made designs I’ve seen before in mods for games like Game Dev Tycoon that had to create what they thought the new console would look like. It’s pretty boxy, and very futuristic.
