While there have been plenty of reports providing us with an understanding of what the chip powering the PS6 will be capable of handling, few details have been revealed about the next-gen console’s other components. Industry insider KeplerL2 has taken to the NeoGAF forums to provide some details on the matter. In a series of posts, the leaker has said that the two planned SKUs of the PS6 – the handheld and the home console – will have 24 GB and 30 GB of GDDR7 RAM respectively.
A notable increase over the 16 GB RAM in the PS5 and PS5 Pro, the upcoming consoles will also likely feature similarly-shared memory allocation, with the RAM being available to both the CPU and GPU. The PS6 RAM modules are noted as being split across a number of 3 GB modules, with the handheld sporting 8 and the home console having 10. The memory is expected to feature transfer speeds of 32 GB/s, and will be socketed on a 160-bit bus, totalling up to around 640 GB/s memory bandwidth across all modules throughout the PS6 motherboard.
When asked whether 24 GB RAM would be overkill for a handheld system and if 20 GB would be enough, KeplerL2 noted that it is an unfortunate necessity. “20GB is not enough,” they wrote. “Yeah an extra $100 to the [bill of materials] sucks but they just have to deal with it for 1-2 years until prices come down.”
The leaker is referring to the global memory shortages that have caused a massive spike in RAM prices. A report from last month indicated that, while both Sony and Microsoft had initially been aiming for a 2027 launch for their next-gen console hardware, the memory prices have likely had a major impact on these plans, and the companies are pushing back the launch date to beyond the next year.
Back in December, a report had indicated that Sony is using the PS5’s Power Saver options and support for it as a sort of Trojan Horse to get studios used to developing for the upcoming PS6 handheld. YouTuber Moore’s Law is Dead spoke about a document that has been given to developers where Sony has noted that “games should be runnable on only 8 threads.”
“Sony just patched all of their SDKs for PS5 game development back to 1.0 to support Power Saver Mode (they’re currently on 12.0),” said a developer to Moore’s Law is Dead. “To be clear – they didn’t even do this for PS5 Pro support – if you had an old launch game on SDK 1.0 or 2.0, they’d tell you to ‘update to the latest SDK’ if you wanted to start working on adding direct PS5 Pro modes to your game. That means Power Saver Mode support is more important to them than Pro support!”
The PS6 handheld, believed to be codenamed Canis, will reportedly be powered by an AMD CPU with 4 Zen 6c cores and a GPU with between 12 and 20 RDNA5-based compute units running at clock speeds of between 1.6 and 2.0 GHz. The system is believed to be capable of running with a power draw of 15 watts.
