Following up on a rumour from earlier this month that Sony has been using the recently-introduced low power mode on the PS5 as a “trojan horse” to try and ensure backwards compatibility on the PS6 handheld, Moore’s Law is Dead is now claiming that the the PS5 software development kit (SDK) has been patched to focus on Power Saver support. In a recent episode of the Broken Silicon video podcast, he noted that the SDK was previously on version 12.0, while the recent patch has changed its version numbering to 1.0.
This, he believes, indicates that Sony is placing a high priority on ensuring that more games get support for Low Power mode. Along with this, Moore’s Law is Dead has also indicated that there will be more Low Power modes coming “eventually”, according to a new document about CPU optimisation. The exact line from the document reads: “new operation modes may be supported in the future and applications may run in environments with different available CPU configurations.”
Moore’s Law is Dead also said that a developer told him that, going by Sony’s actions with regards to its dev kit, the company is more focused on promoting its Power Saver Mode than it is in supporting modes that take advantage of the extra horsepower offered by the PS5 Pro. Another document, according to the developer, noted that “games should be runnable on only 8-Threads”, which might give us an indication of the kind of horsepower that we might see with the PS6 handheld.
“Sony just patched all of their SDKs for PS5 game development back to 1.0 to support Power Saver Mode (they’re currently on 12.0),” said a developer to Moore’s Law is Dead. “To be clear – they didn’t even do this for PS5 Pro support – if you had an old launch game on SDK 1.0 or 2.0, they’d tell you to ‘update to the latest SDK’ if you wanted to start working on adding direct PS5 Pro modes to your game. That means Power Saver Mode support is more important to them than Pro support!”
“Additionally, one doc talking about CPU optimizations mentions that there are new Low Power Modes coming eventually, and directly suggests that your games should be runnable on only 8-Threads…it even at one point states: ‘new operation modes may be supported in the future and applications may run in environments with different available CPU configurations’…Sony is definitely preparing a Canis Handheld!”
As for what kind of hardware we can expect from the PS6 handheld—codenamed Canis—it is expected to run on an AMD CPU with 4 Zen 6c cores, and an AMD GPU with between 12 and 20 RDNA 5 compute units clocked at between 1.6 and 2.0 GHz. The memory supporting this is expected to be around 16 GB of LPDDR5X-7500+ RAM on a 128-bit bus. The whole package is expected to draw 15 W worth of power, and the performance target for the handheld is reportedly going to be around half of the PS5’s rasterisation performance, but stronger ray tracing performance.