Can't believe all the old BS that suddenly reappears. March so far has been nothing but a joke, thanks to no official announcement in February. Now everybody is just grasping for straws and digging out old bullshit rumors to turn them into new bullshit rumors. How do you even survive in all this nonsense? If you honestly believe that the Github leak is false, then Sony is doing what, launch a 12/13 TF PS5 and a 24 TF Pro? And if you believe in a Pro, that means that Github is probably correct and that all insiders are incorrect, because the only jump in performance that would be needed for a two SKU strategy would then be 9.2 TF PS5 and Big Navi 18.4 TF Pro. The latter would be around 650 mm^2 and the APU alone would cost $320, it would consume 400 Watt and probably be literally two times as noisy as a PS5 Pro, while selling abysmal numbers because of its price tag (700+).
All while you have actual rumors founded in reality of a 4 TF SKU and a 12 TF SKU for Xbox. Something that makes much more sense. Because there needs to be a substantial gap between them so that either one has a different share of the market. A 399 9 TF PS5 vs. a 499 12 TF PS5 Pro is complete nonsense. You need to produce both SKUs. And you have no idea which one will sell better. Ever wondered why you are not getting different console colors at launch? Because they can't do it, because they have to condense everything into one SKU because of limited parts. All that while Covid-19 will already limit availability of consoles.
When is the time to wake up from wonderland? It can't all be true, now can it? All that talk about a 12 TF PS5 comes from XSX being 12 TF. Before that, all the discussion happened between 9 and 10 TF. Why is that? Because it makes sense. Because some things are financially viable, and others are not. I see a pattern here. When Ariel first came up it was rumored to be the Xbox APU. That soon shifted because 8 TF felt too powerful for Xbox for some. It was also using RDNA1, and there was a growing "concerned" group of users that made everybody believe that Xbox was still using GCN and RDNA was built for Sony only. So 8 TF RDNA Navi for Sony and maybe 10 TF GCN Vega for Microsoft. Well, it turned out to be that Ariel was indeed a Sony APU. And everybody was happy with it.
Then E3 happened and Microsoft talked about most powerful consoles and using next gen RDNA. People were confused. So if Xbox was at 10 TF and it wasn't GCN (but there was still a reason to believe that Microsoft was just talking about the GCN equivalent, because "insiders"), surely Sony would be bigger than that. And so talk shifted to 9 - 10 TF for PS5. And look, Oberon appeared and it was at 9.2 TF, how crazy was that? All was good in wonderland. Then the VGA happened. Double the One X for Microsoft. Yeah, for sure they were talking about GCN tflops now. 2x X = 12 / 1.5 = 8 < 9.2. Sony still wins. Microsoft with their lies and make-believe PR BS. We never forget. But just in case they actually mean 12 TF Navi, let's up our insider knowledge to 12 TF for everyone. Doesn't matter really, I always said 10+, double digits. But really I meant 12+. Still double digits, higher than 10+. Two weeks later every insider follows Klee and pretends it is 12 TF. Fair enough, at least some consistency.
Then the Github leak happens. And it's threatening all dreams. PS5 is back at 9.2. Xbox is at 12 and on RDNA2. It's dismissed as being old and outdated. Because Klee said so. Because Matt said so. Well, there it is. Microsoft is really just playing games and this false leak is showing them at a false 12 TF. And then MS announced 12 TF RDNA2. Total breakdown. RDNA exclusive for Sony? Screw that, Sony uses the latest technology too. Cerny (who created the most underpowered Playstation ever) would never disappoint us. And so the pattern continued. Just like Ariel and 8 TF and then 10 TF and then 12 TF now RDNA2 was the new savior of Playstation. And hey, they can even go to 13 TF. Or 14 TF. And now a Pro, because if Microsoft goes with two SKUs, then Sony does the same.
And it's wrong, all of it. Because it implies that Sony is reacting to Sony. They both made their choices over two years ago. That's when they decided the amount of TF they wanted to target, which architecture to use, which price point to target, what kind of cooling would be required to get there. That was all decided over two years ago. And then you run with it. Mark Cerny was hired for one job: To get rid of high subsidies for console hardware and create a smart console instead of a powerful console. That's what the PS4 is. A cheap console with a low end mobile CPU and a mid to low end mobile GPU. To make money right from the start. And it was a great design, just look at what 1.8 TF GCN and a Jaguar delivered. Some visually truly amazing games. But they were only ever matching low to medium PC settings in multiplatform games. Because in reality they were weak. Cerny then went on to design a second console with the same price tag. The PS4 Pro. Still no loss leading device. Instead he talks about how brute force is a stupid solution and checkerboard rendering is the way to reach 4K, because you don't see a difference.
And now that very same Cerny that designed two very price sensitive consoles in a smart way to punch harder than the sum of their parts is expected to go with the latest technology and the highest performance because ... why exactly? Oh, right, because insiders say so. And because Microsoft can never beat Sony.
But they already did. Remember the Github leak? Assuming that Oberon is outdated: Arden is obviously not. So that means that Sony went from a one year headstart (PS5 devkits have been around since December 2018, XSX devkits have been around since November 2019) to a point where in June 2019 AMD is testing Microsoft's final APU, while they are still only testing Sony's devkit v2 APU, with 3 and 4 not even showing up. Boy, did Microsoft beat them if Github leak is wrong. From lagging a year behind to being half a year in front over the span of two years. Damn!
But of course that's highly unlikely. What is likely is that back in early 2018 Sony made the decision to repeat the success of PS4 and target Nintendo along the way. A 399 price tag was targeted, along with some cool new controller features to enhance the gaming experience. Back in 2018 everybody was realizing that Moore's Law had run its course, there would be no more TF wars, it was all about smart design from now on. Something Cerny excels at. If you can create games like Horizon Zero Dawn with 1.8 TF - does it matter if you end up at 8 or 9 or 10 TF? It doesn't.
At the same time Microsoft made another choice. Instead of chasing Nintendo, like they had done with Xbox One and Kinect, they decided to go with the power crown. A small, but highly profitable piece of the market. One X was the console that tested the water for such an audience and it worked out. In 2020 RDNA2 would become available, so why not go with it? Sure, it's more expensive, but it really doesn't matter in a console built for performance, not for price.
And then something happened that disrupted everything. Up until this point it was a hardware company (Sony) against a software company (Microsoft). It was easy to figure out who would have the smarter design and a 9 TF PS5 would probably not feel underpowered to a 12 TF Xbox. Do some checkerboard rendering and the resulting image will ne very comparable, see 4 TF Pro vs. 6 TF One X. Until Nvidia showed DLSS. That's the true game changer. Deep learning algorithms only ever get smarter and better results over time and they are a software problem. Not a hardware problem. If there is one company (aside from Amazon and Google) that can go all-in on a cloud-based software problem, it's Microsoft, who at the point Nvidia revealed DLSS had already been working on a similar technology for a couple of years.
Did Sony anticipate machine learning for PS5? That's the question you should ask yourself, instead of getting into petty TF wars that have no meaning anymore. Even if Sony has 12 TF - if they don't have machine learning, they are outperformed by a factor of 1:3. As in Xbox Series X would be three times as powerful as PS5 if they are both at 12 TF. So did Cerny, who is a hardware guy, who designed Backwards Compatibility for PS5 only through hardware, plan for this? Sony didn't talk about in in the Wired articles. Or at CES. Cerny did talk up a game changer of his own. But it was a hardware part, the SSD. If PS5 doesn't include hardware for machine learning the war is over. A 4 TF Lockhart SKU with machine learning (as rumored back in January 2019) will rival a 12 TF PS5 in 4K performance. That PS5 would still outperform Lockhart massively at 1080p to 1440p resolutions, of course. We are seeing a shift from dominance of hardware to dominance of software. And with a hardware company and a software company creating these consoles, the shift will be similar.
A PS5 Pro is sort of the solution to this problem. A 9.2 TF RDNA1 PS5 and a 12+ TF RDNA2 PS5 Pro later. I think it will be interesting either way, with a 299 Lockhart potentially outperforming a 9.2 TF PS5 at a $100 to $200 lower price point because of software. And a 12 TF XSX that will be unrivaled in its first year or two. That 8K laser mark on the XSX APU? It's there for a reason.