As we get closer to the rumored late 2027/early 2028 launch for next-generation consoles, notable leaker KeplerL2 has now claimed that the bill of materials for Sony’s next-gen console – the PS6 – is around $200 lower than that of Project Helix. In a pair of social media posts, the leaker has discussed the fact that consoles are typically designed and developed over the course of five years, and that no company had foreseen the current state of the hardware market, with memory and storage being in short supply.
“People really need to understand that designing a console is a 5+ year process. Sony and MS never intended to release consoles for over $1k. There was just no way they possibly could have expected RAM/NAND prices to go up by 5x.” Responding to another social media user about rumors regarding the memory for the PS6 costing Sony $680 per console, KeplerL2 said, “PS6 BOM is approximately $200 lower than Magnus.”
Magnus is the AMD-designed chip that will power Microsoft’s Project Helix. The chip is rumored to be quite large and will be capable of slightly more horsepower than the AMD chip in the PS6. For comparison, the PS6’s chip is capable of 40 TFLOPS (trillion floating-point operations per second) of compute, while Project Helix’s Magnus is capable of 56 TFLOPS.
While many in the industry have called for Sony and Microsoft to push back their console release plans to wait for memory prices to stabilize, the production pipelines for Project Helix and the PS6 are noted as already being too far along for delays to be possible. In fact, KeplerL2 claimed last month that chips for both consoles had already been “taped out”.
The term “taped out” means that both companies have worked with chip-makers like AMD to finalize the design of the hardware that would power the consoles. The term itself has roots in the 1970s, when chip designs used to be written on magnetic data tapes before they could be shipped to fabrication plants. In the modern day, the process of taping out essentially means that the company has sent the design files to the fabrication plants that will then start actually building the chips.
As for whether a potential delay would help either of the companies, forum users have noted that Sony and Microsoft had to deal with challenging markets when they both launched the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, respectively. Despite supply chain constraints due to the global pandemic at the time, Sony and Microsoft decided to go ahead with launching their consoles because keeping them stocked in warehouses would just end up being more expensive in the long run.
“You can apply this logic to the PS5 launch. The PS4 was selling extremely well in 2019, and component costs and shortages were hitting the industry hard due to COVID in 2020. The first interview regarding potential PS5 hardware was in April 2019, while we already had that Amethyst announcement regarding next-gen last year.”
In the meantime, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has been discussing how the company needs to figure out how it can make next-generation consoles more affordable for consumers.
