With Microsoft having recently taken the first steps towards officially unveiling its next-generation Xbox, a new report by Moore’s Law is Dead has offered more details about the differences in hardware between Project Helix and Sony’s PS6. One of the biggest differences between the PS6’s AMD Orion and Project Helix’s AMD Magnus chips is their die size. While the former is believed to come in at 280 mm-squared in area, fabricated on TSMC’s 3 nm process, the latter will seemingly have a much larger die, coming in at 408 mm-squared thanks to its combination of a 144 mm-squared SoC (system on a chip) and 264 mm-squared GPU. This also means that Project Helix will end up being more expensive than the PS6, since its chip is pricier to manufacture.
Another difference is how the compute units between Magnus and Orion have been set up. PS6 will seemingly run on 54 RDNA 5 compute units for its graphics, and 8 Zen 6c cores paired with 2 Zen 6 low-power cores dedicated to handling the operating system. This was, according to Moore’s Law is Dead, reportedly gives a 20 percent boost in CPU power available for running games, when compared to the PS5’s CPU which didn’t have dedicated cores for the OS. Project Helix’s Magnus, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to have low-power cores. Rather, its CPU consists of up to 3 Zen 6 cores paired with 8 Zen 6c cores, while its GPU will have 68 RDNA 5 compute units.
Ultimately, the CPU powering Project Helix is noted as being more powerful thanks to its inclusion of Zen 6 cores, compared to the PS6’s Zen 6c cores. However, the difference isn’t expected to be too large between the two consoles when it comes to overall performance.
As for the GPU, Sony is reportedly targeting clock speeds of 3 GHz, which will result in performance of around 40 TFLOPS (trillion floating point operations per second). It is theorized to be capable of triple the rasterization performance of PS5, and up to 12 times the ray tracing performance. The Magnus chip powering Project Helix, however, is expected to be around 25 percent faster than the PS6 on paper. However, how this will play out in practice remains to be seen.
As for when these consoles might actually come out, Moore’s Law is Dead expressed a belief that Sony is unlikely to actually delay the PS6. He noted that, while there are logistical issues that might drive up the cost right now owing to memory shortages and skyrocketing RAM prices, the company has dealt with similar issues just a few years ago, when the pandemic-induced lockdown caused similar problems with supply chains. To that end, he expects Sony to stick with its planned 2027 launch window, or maybe even push the console back to early 2028. However, a delay to 2029 is noted as being unlikely since it would cost the company more to disrupt its plans than it would to eat the inflated costs and launch the console as previously planned.
According to sources familiar with these issues, the memory situation is expected to get “significantly better” by the end of the current year, and will be “a lot better” by the end of next year. The judgment call on the release of the PS6 will likely be made at the start of 2027, “right before they start manufacturing at TSMC.”
