Following Monday's report on the PlayStation 6 and PlayStation handheld codenames (Orion and Canis), YouTube Moore's Law Is Dead (MLID) has now shared specs for both upcoming consoles from a leaked 2023 AMD presentation.
According to the leaks, Sony is going for a relatively conservative system. Its main goal will be keeping power lower than a base PlayStation 5, with the target being 160W TBP. The console will employ a chiplet design, with 8 Zen 6 cores and between 40 and 48 RDNA 5 Compute Units clocked at over 3GHz.
These are fewer Compute Units than the 60 available for the PlayStation 5 Pro, but they will run much faster. Moreover, RDNA 5 is expected to bring a noticeable improvement in IPC performance, so each Compute Unit will deliver more performance than the CUs in the PS5 Pro.
The memory also has a lower bus than the PS5 Pro (160 or 192 bit compared to the PS5 Pro's 256 bit), but it will be powered by the much faster GDDR7, allowing it to reach clocks of 32Gbps for an estimated bandwidth of 640GB/s-768GB/s, depending on the final bus spec. That's higher than the PS5 Pro's bandwidth of 576GB/s.
Overall, the estimation is that rasterization performance will be over three times that of the base PlayStation 5 and around double that of the newer PlayStation 5 Pro. That would place the performance level of the PlayStation 6 roughly around a GeForce RTX 4080, although of course, it's never quite an apples-to-apples comparison when measuring consoles and PC GPUs directly. The uplift of ray tracing performance should be much higher (6-10x), thanks to the expected advancements AMD will bring in the area.
Backward compatibility is expected to be maintained for PS5 and PS4. The production phase should begin in mid-2027, with an estimated release in stores in late 2027 or early 2028 for a price of around $499.
As for the Project Canis handheld, it should use a monolithic 3nm die equipped with 4 Zen 6C cores. The GPU is expected to have between 12 and 20 RDNA 5 Compute Units clocked between 1.6 and 2.2GHz. The memory will equip a 128-bit bus with LPDDR5X 7500 RAM. Sony is reportedly targeting a 15-watt thermal board power.
Rasterization performance should be around half that of the base PlayStation 5, but thanks to the advancements brought by the RDNA 5 architecture, the uplift of ray tracing performance should be higher. The handheld should also feature backward compatibility with PS4 and PS5, microSD and M.2 SSD storage support, haptic feedback, dual microphones, a touchscreen, and a USB-C port supporting fast charging and video output.
Overall, it should easily outperform the Xbox Ally X. However, that's not saying much since that handheld is launching soon, and the PlayStation handheld is instead targeting a similar launch window to its bigger sibling, the PlayStation 6. Pricing estimates put it around $400 or $500.
Moore's Law Is Dead also briefly touched upon the next-generation Xbox console, whose codename is Magnus. It should be equipped with 11 Zen 6 cores and 68 Compute Units, proving to be more powerful than the PS5 Pro. The YouTuber says the new Xbox console won't be available before 2027, which resonates with previous rumors that Microsoft might be looking to try a repeat of the Xbox 360 situation, which debuted one year before the PlayStation 3 and was Xbox's most successful console to date. Still,
It should be noted that the specs came from an old presentation. Therefore, specific details might have changed since. We won't know the official specs until well into 2026, at the very least. Until then, stay tuned.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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