Quite a few rumours about next-generation consoles have been coming up, especially since we are now five years into the current-generation since the release of the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. A new report now indicates that the next-gen PS6 handheld might even end up competing against Nintendo because it seemingly has the ability to dock and run its games on a bigger display.
In a recent video, YouTube channel Moore’s Law is Dead has claimed that, along with this docking capability, the PS6 handheld will also be backwards compatible with the PS4 and PS5, allowing players to carry their PlayStation game libraries wherever they go. This backward compatibility has reportedly been a major feature for the PS6 handheld, with reports indicating that it won’t even need any extra work from developers for the games to run.
The video also claims to have knowledge about the hardware specs of the handheld, stating that it will be powered by an AMD chip with RDNA 5 16 compute units that can run at 1.20 GHz in handheld mode. When docked the system can seemingly push its clock speed all the way up to 1.65 GHz. The YouTuber has said that this information comes from AMD documentation that he was able to check out.
Despite all of this horsepower under the hood, the PS6 handheld will also seemingly be reasonably priced, under the price tag of the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X. The lower pricing is likely enabled by Sony doing the R&D and other development of the handheld completely in-house, rather than partnering with an external company like Asus. The price will reportedly fall in the $299 to $399 price range for the PS6S, $399 to $499 for the PS6 handheld, and $549 to $699 for the PS6 home console.
These haven’t been the only rumours surrounding next-gen consoles. Earlier this month, a report indicated that the GPU powering the PS6 would be of equivalent power to AMD’s current-gen Radeon RX 9070 XT PC graphics card. Along with this, the chip would also have custom features, such as support for Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite-style graphical techniques at a hardware level, and a Streaming Wave Coalescer that allows for out-of-order execution of programs.
As for the handheld, another report has indicated that, despite being more powerful than the PS5, the PS6 handheld’s chip will be a lot more efficient in how much energy it needs and what this energy is used for. To achieve this, the handheld is expected to use a chip based on a single die fabricated at a 3 nm process, and have 4 Zen 6C cores. The memory bus of the handheld is expected to be similarly high-performance, coming in at 128 bit. The RAM itself is expected to be LPDDR5X. All of this hardware is expected to run on 15 watts.
The performance of the PS6 handheld is expected to be around the same level of rasterisation performance as the base PS5, thanks in large part to improvements in efficiency and power made by AMD in its more recent chips.
