PS5: design between savings and performance, less innovative than Xbox Series X, for Digital Foundry
Many have asked Digital Foundry to carry out its own technical analysis focused on the PS5 teardown carried out by Sony and this has finally arrived: unfortunately for a precise analysis there would be I needed to actually have the console at hand, but Sony has now decided not to go this route in this PS5 pre-launch, remaining rather reserved as regards the experimental tests on the new console.
Practically opposite attitude to that of Microsoft, which allowed Digital Foundry, among others, to see closely all the internal components of the Xbox Series X as early as March zo this year. In any case, Sony's teardown is quite explanatory of its own, leaving Digital Foundry with some comments on how the PS5 was engineered.
One very interesting thing is Sony's diversity of approach in the design of the PS5. which led to having two machines designed quite differently, albeit similar in terms of performance. According to Richard Leadbetter, who conducted the analysis, "the design is more conventional than that of the Xbox Series X and the main challenges faced by the designers have been solved by focusing primarily on size."
The challenges in question are above all those represented by heat and noise, also considering the high clock frequency achievable by the PS5 SoC, which required an intense study on the dissipation and cooling system. This is also the main reason why the console is so big, as reported by Yahuhiro Ootori himself, VP of the mechanical design division of Sony Interactive Entertainment.
PS5 uses a more traditional approach to board construction motherboard, arranged in a single piece of really large dimensions to better space the components and allow a better heat dispersion, in a different way from the idea of the broken board in individual processors and southbridge board.
Even the size of the SoC, with the different amount of components present in it, including a smaller amount of compute units and GDDR6 memory controllers, could represent an important saving element from a manufacturing cost point of view.
L 'basic idea, according to Digital Foundry, is to keep costs low with a smaller processor but increasing its performance with a high flow of power, from di distribute between CPU and GPU through variable frequencies. In this sense, dissipation becomes even more important and the solution adopted, according to Leadbetter, can be considered "in line with the Toyota philosophy, that is not to reinvent the wheel (as perhaps Microsoft could have done with Series X), but to rely on solutions that they work by adding some new solutions where needed ".
" The price is paid in terms of volume: this is clearly a huge console, relatively speaking, but the advantage for Sony is considerable in terms of reducing the construction costs, "Digital Foundry claims.
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