The console will use a variable frequency system to be able to cool properly despite game conditions.
Sony revealed on Wednesday all the technical characteristics of the PS5 architecture. Mark Cerny, architect of PlayStation 5, explained how they are building what will be the most powerful console in the history of the company. Now, we delve into two aspects that concern gamers and that have been one of the workhorses of the current generation: the noise of the console and its temperature.
As Cerny explained in the presentation, we are talking about a system with an AMD Ryzen Zen2 8-core CPU, a 10.28 TFLOps GPU, 16 GB of RAM and a high (very high) speed SSD, capable of offering a performance of 5.5 GB / s, a hundred times what a PS4 is capable of. So how can you cool all that power so that the console doesn't overheat and its fans don't saturate?
According to the official argument, the boost speed of the PlayStation 5 will be variable, so that the maximum performance of the system will be linked to the temperature. There may be scenarios where ventilation is not able to keep the PS5 temperature in an acceptable range, so they have designed both the CPU and the GPU so that all units always behave the same way: all PS5 will process the same loads with the same level of performance; regardless of environment and temperature.
PS4 interior and fan
As stated to Digital Foundry via Eurogamer: "Instead of operating at a constant frequency to let the power vary depending on the load, what we do is basically have a constant power and let the frequency vary depending on the load" .
Thus, "Instead of looking at the actual temperature on the silicon chip, what we do is look at the activities that the CPU and GPU are doing to adjust the frequencies accordingly, which makes everything deterministic and repeatable." The operation will be, therefore, different from the Xbox Series X, where the possible peaks of energy consumption and their effect on frequencies and performance must be considered, a challenge for those of Phil Spencer.
Mark Cerny during the PS5 presentation.
All in all, maintaining the balance of cooling and temperature of the PlayStation 5 will, very possibly, favor that the conditions of excessive noise of the console are reduced to very small cases.
You can check here the differences between PS5 and Xbox Series X; also the differences between PS5 and PS4. Also, here we delve into the backward compatibility of PlayStation 5 with PS4, which has nuances.
All in all, in this report we tell you everything we know about PS5, a console that —if everything goes well— will go on sale at Christmas 2020. In the following article we summarize all the games confirmed for the console.
Track | Eurogamer
