The next Japanese console winks at environmental protection. When turned off, it will consume much less than the PS4
Sony responds to criticism about the standby consumption of its PS4 console by announcing that the next PS5 will consume just half a watt in idle.
Considering that the PS4 consumes 8.5 Watts when idle, for every million PlayStation 5 sold there will be an energy saving equal to the average consumption of 1,000 American homes. The controversy about the consumption of consoles when they are on standby began in 2014, when the Natural Resources Defense Council (American nonprofit association that deals with environmental defense) found that a PS4 consumes an average of 137 Watts during gaming sessions, 89 Watts when it is playing a video and 8.5 Watts when it is doing absolutely nothing.
Sony PS5: technical specifications
It must also be said that the consumption of just half a watt will be achieved by activating a special option, normally disabled among the factory settings of the next PlayStation 5. On the other hand, the future Sony's toy looks much more to the performance and fluidity of the game than to the environment. From the information we have at the moment, in fact, it seems that the PS5 will be equipped with a respectable hardware: the main processor will be an AMD CPU with Zen2 architecture to 7 nm, while the GPU will be derived from the Radeon Navi series, also AMD. The hard drive will be replaced by a high-performance SSD that will reduce game loading times to a fifth. It would seem, finally, that the PS5 will be fully capable of handling the 8K resolution and 3D ray tracing, while maintaining backward compatibility with the entire catalog of games PS4.
The competition: not only Xbox Scarlett
The PlayStation 5 will have the difficult task of equaling, and possibly exceed, the 100 million and more units sold by the PS4. When it comes out on the market, probably by November 2020, will have to fight not only with the historic competitor made in Microsoft (ie the Xbox Scarlett, which should arrive on the market almost at the same time), but also with new players. One of all Google that, in the meantime, will have already launched its gaming cloud platform for about a year. Google has promised that "The future of gaming is not a console" but, even taking for granted the enormous power of its servers, will have to deal with the limits imposed by the connection between the servers and the end user. What will gaming look like in late 2020?