Since we’re five years into the current console generations, rumours have been growing about the hardware that we might see in the next generation of PlayStation and Xbox consoles. According to YouTuber Moore’s Law is Dead, the AMD Zen 6 chip powering the PS6 and next Xbox—codenamed Magnus—will run on 11 CPU cores, along with graphics powered by a 264 mm squared graphics die. The 11 cores are split up into 3 Zen 6 cores and 8 Zen 6 C cores.
The SoC itself is 144 mm squared, and the graphics die connects to it with a Bridge Die. The graphics die has a 384-bit memory bus, which would make it the widest memory bus for any console in the market currently. For the sake of comparison, the memory bus in the Xbox Series X is 320-bit. This means that the flow of data between the graphics die and the SoC will be wider, allowing for faster processing and transferring of data.
Taking all of the various hardware parts of the Magnus chip into account, the APU (GPU + SoC) totals up to having 80 compute units across its graphics and CPU-related cores.
According to Moore’s Law is Dead, the chip was originally thought by him to be for mid-range laptops. However, documents have indicated that the chip is instead meant for a semi-custom order, which means that it was designed for consoles.
Interestingly, known hardware industry insider Kepler also responded to Moore’s Law is Dead on social media platform X. While the YouTuber believed that Magnus might be a chip for the PS6, Kepler points out that it might instead be a chip for the next Xbox. According to him, the codenames for PlayStation’s chips are named after characters from the various works of Shakespeare.
Earlier this week, a rumour indicated that, while DirectX 12 Work Graphs—a major new feature when it comes to graphics processing and computing—has been developed, the next-gen consoles might ultimately not use it early in their lives. According to Kepler, the feature won’t see adoption in the next consoles for their launch because the period will be considered a cross-generational one. This means that studios will often be making games for both the current-gen systems as well as next-gen systems.
We’ve already seen such cross-generational periods in the past, with one of the more recent examples being God of War Ragnarok, which, while originally meant for the PS5, also saw a release on PS4.
Work Graphs also doesn’t yet support procedural generation, which is often used for large-scale development of dense assets in the game development industry. “WorkGraphs [sic] is of course part of next-gen, but don’t expect too much adoption from devs as the engines/tools they use don’t support this style of graphics programming (procedural generation), specially in the cross-gen period,” wrote Kepler.
This leaked Magnus chip might be one of the early results of the partnership that was announced between Microsoft and AMD where the latter would make chips for the former’s various gaming hardware.
