Sony PS4K is codenamed NEO, features upgraded CPU, GPU, RAM—report

Sony may be tight-lipped for now, but it’s looking increasingly likely that the company will release an updated version of the PlayStation 4 later this year. So far, the rumoured console has gone under the moniker PS4K or PS4.5, but a new report from gaming site GiantBomb suggests that the codename for the console is “NEO,” and it even provides hardware specs for the PlayStation 4’s improved CPU, GPU, and higher bandwidth memory.

Those specs include a CPU clock speed bump from 1.6GHz to 2.1Ghz, an improved AMD GPU with 36 Compute Units (CU) running at 911MHz, and a memory bandwidth bump up to 218GB/s. While GiantBomb noted that the CPU cores remain based on AMD’s Jaguar architecture—which was originally a chip developed for laptops—the GPU specs tie into recent rumours that AMD had landed big design wins for its new Polaris architecture.

Should the PS4 NEO GPU feature 36 CUs, that would mean around 2304 stream processors—effectively doubling the amount from the old chip. According to TechPowerUp, those specs are extremely similar to AMD’s Polaris 10 “Ellesmere” chip, which is rumoured to be used in an upcoming standalone Radeon R9 480 graphics card. While AMD has refused to comment on the scuttlebutt—telling Ars, “We do not comment on rumour or speculation”—the company has noted in the past that the focus of Polaris is on power efficiency and “console-class gaming on a thin-and-light notebook.”

AMD’s recent product roadmap indicated that Polaris will be used in mid-range parts.

Indeed, a product roadmap shown in March at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco indicated that AMD will swiftly follow up Polaris with Vega, a higher-performance part featuring second-generation High Bandwidth Memory (HBM2).

Using a more efficient Polaris GPU might be necessary, not only for performance but to keep the power envelope of the PS4 NEO down. While Sony has already updated the internals of the PS4 since launch with the CUH-1200 model—reducing the amount of memory chips and fitting a more efficient power supply—the APU itself remains unchanged and is based on the same 28nm manufacturing process.

Anandtech’s analysis of the Jaguar architecture before the launch of the PS4 and Xbox One suggested that the PS4’s 1.6GHz clock speed was the “sweet spot” for Jaguar, with a boost up to 2GHz requiring a 66 percent increase in TDP. That’s more power for the PS4 NEO to suck down and more heat to try to remove, something that Sony is unlikely to want after quieting down the console with the CUH-1200 updates. However, that potential power increase could be offset by a move to a more efficient 14nm process, which Polaris is already confirmed to be based on.

But what does this mean for games?

Technical details aside, GiantBomb’s industry sources had some other titbits about how the PS4 NEO might work. Starting in October—the rumoured announcement/release date for the new console—every PS4 game will be required to run in a “Base Mode” designed for older hardware, and a “NEO Mode” for the updated hardware. NEO Mode games will be able to make use of the faster CPU and GPU in the PS4 NEO, as well as an additional 512MB of memory budget. The idea will be to give 1080p games a frame rate and visual fidelity boost, while also giving developers the option to upscale games to 4K or render them natively at the resolution.

GiantBomb claimed documents it had received detail suggestions for how developers can build games in 4K, all of which explicitly state that “the frame rate of games in NEO Mode must meet or exceed the frame rate of the game on the original PS4 system.” While the upgraded CPU, GPU, and memory bandwidth will help performance, the PS4’s GPU would still lag behind current generation high-end parts from AMD and Nvidia, all of which struggle to render games natively at 4K on PC.