Sony has contracted AMD to supply the chip that will power the PlayStation 6, according to a new report from Reuters. The PlayStation 6 will have backwards compatibility with the PlayStation 5.
According to the report, both Intel and AMD were the final bidders for the contract from Sony, which would see the winning company produce the PlayStation 6 chips. This contract was signed by AMD in 2022, putting a damper of Intel’s manufacturing and design efforts let by Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger. Originally, Gelsinger incorporated the PlayStation chip deal into a turnaround plan that would establish Intel’s contract manufacturing business.
However, even if Intel won, there would be a problem due to the risk of losing backwards compatibility with previous generation PlayStation consoles, which had hardware supplied by AMD. It would be costly to ensure backwards compatibility on an Intel-based system, and it was a prominent topic of discussion between Intel and Sony. Broadcom was also involved in the bidding process, before bowing out and leaving Intel and AMD as the final bidders.
AMD and PlayStation’s latest jointly-developed project is the PlayStation 5 Pro, which releasing on November 7 for $699.99. The new PS5 Pro aims to deliver smooth 60 FPS with high fidelity visuals. To accomplish this, the console has an improved AMD RDNA3 GPU with 67% more compute units and 28% faster memory. This gives a 45% boost in rendering. Moreover, the console features more powerful ray tracing abilities (double to triple ray casting speed) with more dynamic reflection and refraction of light.
