A report on Reuters has claimed that Sony is already beavering away on the PS6, with the hardware manufacturer allegedly placing backwards compatibility as a major focus for the new console.
The as-yet unannounced PS5 successor is mentioned extensively in the report, which focuses on Intel and how it reportedly lost the contract to produce chips for Sony’s new hardware. AMD instead secured the contract, with talks allegedly taking place in 2022.
Furthermore, it mentions that backwards compatibility is a major focus for Sony going into the next-generation of consoles, and that the format holder would have “risked backwards compatibility” if it had sided with Intel instead of AMD.
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Intel has struggled to find a marquee customer it can publicly talk about for the first manufacturing process, known as 18A, open to other companies. If Intel had won the PlayStation 6 chip, it could have occupied its foundry unit for more than five years, two of the sources said.
While we won’t expect Sony to make any kind of announcement on PS6 for another three years or so, we’ve still heard a few murmurs about it. On the topic of backwards compatibility, it was reported earlier this year that this feature may have been the reason that the PS5 Pro isn’t such a huge leap over the standard console in terms of CPU performance.
Back in June 2023, court documents for the then-ongoing Activision Blizzard FTC trial revealed that Microsoft anticipates new home consoles to arrive in 2028.
[Source – Reuters]