Sony has officially released the PlayStation 5's final specs on Wednesday morning when Sony hosted a special "The Road to PS5" presentation from Mark Cerny. However, ahead of the presentation beginning, a list of the PS5's specifications was leaked early. While Sony's PS5 presentation will go into detail about each of the console's components, the leaked list covers everything generally. The list reveals details including the PS5's ZZen 2 CPU and a GPU clocking in at 10.28 teraflops.
To start, the PS5 features a new custom CPU. The Zen 2 PS5 CPU will have 8 cores that will run at a cap of 3.5 GHz. The PS4's CPU, in comparison, also features 8 cores but runs at a cap of 1.6 GHz. As for the GPU, the PS5's puts out an impressive 10.28 teraflops. The GPU features 36 compute units running at a cap of 2.23GHz. The PS4's GPU put out 1.84 teraflops with 18 compute units running at 800MHz. Overall, it's an incredible generational leap.
It should be noted that these official specs for the PS5's GPU line up with rumors about the hardware from recent months, though are somewhat higher than predicted numbers. One leak described the PS5 GPU as comparable to an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super PC graphics card. This would have placed the PS5 GPU right around 9-10 teraflops of performance, now proven accurate.
The key piece of hardware revealed in the PS5's specs isn't the GPU or CPU, however. It's the PS5's SSD. Sony is said to have customized its SSD to work with other hardware in an unprecedented way. The result is an impressive 8-9GB/s throughput and a goal of instantaneous loading times.
The comparisons to the Xbox Series X are already happening. However, caution is being encouraged regarding purely numerical comparisons. The PS5's custom build is said to be extremely fast, despite its someone smaller specs. Until there are games showing the performance difference between the two platforms, assumptions may be too early.
One thing that's been made clear is that these are both the CPU and GPU's caps. In his presentation, Cerny makes clear that the PS5 won't always be running at these speeds. However, he makes clear that even in a "worst case game" the PS5 will only see a "couple of percent reduction in frequency." In other words, the PS5 is set to deliver an incredibly powerful and stable experience overall.
The PS5 remains on-track to release holiday 2020.
