Each PlayStation 5 ships with a PCI-Express 4.zero x4 SSD with a flash controller that has been designed in-house by Sony. The controller options 12 flash channels, and is able to no less than 5.5 GB/s switch speeds. When you issue within the exponential features in entry time, Sony expects the SSD to supply a 100x increase in efficient storage sub-system efficiency, leading to virtually no load occasions.
The secret sauce right here is that Sony is utilizing its personal protocol as an alternative of NVMe, in supporting 6 knowledge precedence tiers versus 2 on NVMe. Each PlayStation 5 ships with an 825 GB SSD, which is expandable utilizing exterior HDDs over USB, or a number of third-party M.2 NVMe SSDs licensed by Sony. PlayStation Four video games can run straight off your exterior HDD, however PlayStation 5 video games should be transferred out of your HDD to the console’s major SSD. Past generations of PlayStation applied ZLib knowledge compression on Blu-ray and HDD media. PlayStation 5 is implementing Kraken, with hardware-accelerated de-compression through fixed-function {hardware} constructed straight into the primary SoC.
SoC is the place Cerny sounded restrained in what he wished to reveal. The SoC is a semi-custom chip designed by Sony and AMD, probably on a 7 nm-class silicon fabrication course of. Sony will not specify if it’s a monolithic silicon or an MCM, however there are three building-blocks to it: CPU, GPU, and I/O advanced. The CPU is predicated on AMD “Zen 2” x86-64 microarchitecture, and the GPU is predicated on the corporate’s upcoming RDNA2 graphics structure.
There are eight “Zen 2” CPU cores, though the corporate did not point out if SMT is featured. The most CPU clock velocity is 3.50 GHz. The GPU is a complete completely different story from the one on the Xbox Series X Velocity Engine semi-custom chip. Sony determined to go together with 36 RDNA2 compute items ticking at as much as 2.23 GHz engine clock, in comparison with 52 compute items working at as much as 1.825 GHz on the upcoming Xbox. Sony’s GPU finally ends up with as much as 10.Three TFLOPs max compute throughput, in comparison with Microsoft’s 12 TFLOPs.
Sony additionally shed some “light” on the hardware-accelerated real-time ray-tracing strategy AMD is taking with RDNA2. Apparently, every compute unit includes a {hardware} element known as “Intersection Engine,” with roughly the identical perform as an RT core on NVIDIA “Turing,” which is to calculate the intersection of rays with geometry (similar to triangles or polygons) in a scene. This combines with a reasonably standardized bounding quantity hierarchy (BVH) mannequin to realize a hybrid of ray-traced parts in an in any other case standard rasterized 3D scene (just about the place NVIDIA is correct now with RTX). On PlayStation 5, RDNA2’s ray-tracing {hardware} is leveraged for positional audio, world illumination, shadows, reflections, and full ray-tracing.
The third key element of the SoC is the I/O advanced. This handles all the chip’s I/O, not simply with peripherals and video output, but in addition storage and reminiscence. There are devoted I/O co-processors on-silicon designed to cut back the assorted I/O’s processing stack on the CPU cores, and scale back latencies at varied levels. There’s additionally a specific amount of SRAM…
