Not that I believe this 'leak' at all, but the idea of of RT more usable in real-world gaming can potentially be explained by RTX being designed for offline imaging and then used for gaming, as opposed to a system that may be better for gaming. Quite what that tech would be, I'm not sure, but the discussions on RTX explore the possibilities.
True, but my issue is more with their phrasing than the sentiment of an alternative RT architecture. Had they said that it contains RT hardware different to Nvidia's, I'd understand. For it to immediately become dick waving makes me skeptical.
Just for a laugh, I'm going to make up my own "leak." If anyone can pass this off as a legit leak, anywhere in the interwebs, then I shall love you forever and shower you with Internet kudos.
My leak
Hello there Internet, I decided to take some time out of my schedule of working on a next-gen exclusive, in order to share a peek of the PS5's specs. We only have dev kits, so I don't know everything, but I can at least share the specs for which we're developing.
First up: it's almost a chiplet design. The Sony engineer, who assisted with setting up the most recent dev kits, kept talking excitedly about the chiplet CPU. Higher clocks, better yields etc. But brushed off mention of a chiplet GPU as "currently impossible."
CPU:
As mentioned above, it's Zen 2. It's 8 cores, with SMT enabled, and runs at 3.5GHz.
1 core, and 2 threads, are reserved for the OS. It's overkill, but PS3 and PS4 both reserved way more resources in their first couple of years than their last, so we'll probably get a thread back. Some day.
GPU:
The dev kits are still only using a 7nm Vega, but Navi must be coming along well, because the dev kits have just had their GPU clockspeed increased to 1500MHz. So we're currently playing with 12.28TF.
Memory:
It's HBM2! According to one of Sony's engineers, the retail consoles will apply the HBM stacks directly to the I/O to bring costs waaaaay down. Presumably the dev kits are still using an interposer.
It's 1TB/s of bandwidth. 24GB in the dev kits, but we're programming for 16GB retail, with 1GB reserved for the OS. So 15GB of near 1TB/s memory all for games.
Storage:
The dev kits came with a 2TB HDD, but that'll obviously change across a few retail configurations.
The fun part is the NVME drive! Our kits include a 120GB NVME SSD. We can use up to 55GB of it for our project, but we have to be able to accommodate a save state within that, too. Copying over 15GB of main memory is the easy part, but reducing the SSD usage by 15GB - on a moment's notice - can get tricky!
OS/UI/Apps:
We're not an OS/UI/app developer, so none of this has been formally revealed to us. Neither have we performed a teardown, because Sony would probably frown on it!
We've had an assurance that none of the memory is going to be reserved for apps, so we're not going to have to scramble to reduce the footprint by a couple of GB only weeks before the game launches.
I don't know about a secondary processor, but I think some secondary memory is a given. When I asked the same Sony engineer from above if it was going to be like the PS4's secondary processor and memory, he got a little uncomfortable and responded with "sort of, but actually working."
