AMD 14nm SoC May Power PlayStation Neo

Last month, we reported that AMD was expecting $1.5 billion in revenue in relation to custom gaming SoCs. At the same time, reports have come out from Sony about the PlayStation Neo using a new and improved AMD SoC. Putting them together, we are also getting a new report today about the custom SoC to be used inside the PlayStation Neo.

Previous reports indicated a 14nm SoC headed by 4 Jaguar cores clocked at 2.1Ghz. The new information suggests that these won’t be Jaguar or Zen cores. This leaves the updated Puma+ cores AMD has been using with Carrizo-L. Core improvements would allow Puma+ to increase clock speeds and IPC while dropping power consumption at the same time.

By trimming down CPU power consumption, this leaves a lot of room for the 14nm Polaris GCN 4.0 GPU. The expected range for shader processor count is now being placed at between 1500 and 2560. This is a bit tighter than our previous speculation of around 1152-2304 units. The memory bandwidth is expected to keep the 256bit bus but with faster GDDR5 to reach between 224 and 256 GB/s of bandwidth.

Overall, the outline we’re getting is of a highly competitive AMD SoC, powerful enough to drive VR without issues. This is great news for AMD, Sony and gamers of all stripes, moving performance ever forward. With such a drastic leap in performance, it really drives home the point that the Xbox One and PS4 may be the “last generation” of consoles.