PS5 Pro likely to use same 6nm process as PS5 Slim

Sony's mid-gen PlayStation 5 Pro is expected to deliver beastly performance with 4K 120FPS targets, but the Pro's new custom chip may not see any major efficiencies from a die shrink.

3

New reports sourced from Sony's internal developer network portal suggest that the PlayStation 5 Pro will bring a hefty upgrade over the existing models. According to leaked info, the PS5 Pro's specs will enable higher-end gaming thanks to built-in machine learning and advanced new upscaling technologies like PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), which is Sony's custom answer to NVIDIA DLSS or AMD's FSR. Reports suggest the GPU will also leverage RDNA 3 and RDNA 4 tech from AMD to deliver up to 33 TFLOPs of power.

But what about the SoC itself? The PS5 Pro is built on a new Voila SoC, but this new chip may not benefit from a process reduction like Sony's other mid-gen PS4 Pro, which leveraged significant advantages from a production die shrink (the Pro shrank from the stock PS4's 28nm to 16nm). The PS5, conversely, is built on TSMC's N7 node family, which includes 7nm, 7nm+, and 6nm processes.

• Read more: Xbox Series consoles now use 6nm chips, but there's no CPU or GPU gains
• Read more: PS5 Pro design indicative of Sony's hardware production efficiencies and profit maximization
• Read more: PlayStation 6 specs leak update: AMD Robin APU teased with powerful RDNA 5 GPU, Zen 6 CPU

3

Launch PS5's "Oberon" SoC 7nm+ (left) vs "Oberon Plus" PS5 Slim SoC 6nm (right)

When reports of the PS5 Slim first circulated, rumor had it that the Slim would be built on the 5nm process, which is part of an entirely different process family (N5 instead of N7). We speculated that the Slim would still be part of the N7 family, and our suspicions were confirmed in a PS5 Slim teardown which revealed the system indeed uses 6nm and not 5nm.

This also leads us to believe the PS5 Pro will be built on 6nm to ensure compatibility and streamlined production.

Apparently Eurogamer agrees, with Digital Foundry's Richard Leadbetter saying this in a recent PS5 Pro spec analysis article:

"Sony doesn't talk about fabrication in its documentation (or generally, at all), but the evidence points to PS5 Pro running on the same 6nm process as the Slim. PS5 Pro only has limited clock speed increases (or actual decreases potentially) and the size of the GPU architecturally has not doubled in the way it did with PS4 Pro. Instead, machine learning upscaling is used to make up the difference."

Sony has yet to announce or confirm the PS5 Pro's existence, but reports say the system is targeting a holiday 2024 launch.