While a previous report had speculated about the concept for a “Lite” PS6″S” console that could run on the same Canis APU as the handheld, industry insider KeplerL2 has noted that such a SKU existing would be quite unlikely. In a NeoGAF thread, the leaker has said that it “would be a nightmare for devs,” since they would already have to work around two sets of next-gen PlayStation hardware in the PS6 console and the PS6 handheld.
When asked about the handheld already presenting a challenge for developers, KeplerL2 noted that studios will likely find it easier to scale games down to make them look good on a 1080p display rather than using low-powered hardware to run things on a 4K TV. Along with this, whether or not Sony will insist on developers supporting the PS6 handheld with their releases is still currently unknown.
As for whether the PS6 handheld’s chip could theoretically be made more powerful by adding extra cooling solutions to prevent thermal throttling, KeplerL2 wrote that the Canis APU has been “built with specialized low power libraries.” This means that “it can’t run at high clock speeds no matter how much power you throw at it.”
Using upscaling technologies would also present its own challenges. Since the PS6 handheld is expected to support FSR 5 and PSSR 3, upscaling from the rumoured 540p internal resolution to its 1080p display would take around 2 milliseconds. However, trying to upscale the same image to an even higher resolution, like a 4K TV, would take a lot more time.
“That’s a 16x upscale, which is very hard to do without image artifacts/blur,” they wrote. “Upscale cost is also based on output resolution, so if we assume 1080p upscale FSR5/PSSR3 is around 2ms on Canis, then 4K upscale would be about 8ms. Even with higher clocks from a docked configuration, it’s likely 5-6ms minimum, so devs would need to do extra optimization for docked config just to hit the same FPS as handheld mode.”
Continuing the speculation on a low-powered PS6, KeplerL2 believes that it might be better for Sony to use a weaker version of the Orion APU, which powers the PS6 home console, rather than using Canis. Noting that going with a 6-core CPU cluster, a 16 WGP GPU, 10 percent slower clock speeds on CPU and GPU, and a 128-bit memory bus with 24 GB of RAM would reduce the bill of materials for such a hypothetical console by around $60 for the memory, and between $20 and $30 for the board and cooling. Along with this, Sony could potentially also get near-100 percent yields from chip fabricators.
The idea of a PS6″S” console was brought up by Moore’s Law is Dead, who had discussed its potential bill of materials by using Canis sitting at around $404.38. The idea was that, while the regular PS6 could be sold at around $700, the handheld could sit at the $500-600 spot, and the PS6S could be sold for around $400-500.
