Rumors regarding Sony’s upcoming PlayStation handheld have been the talk of the town for a while. The PS6 handheld, as many have dubbed it, is expected to sport a 4 Zen 6c core CPU, 16GB of memory, and an RDNA 5 GPU with 12-20 CUs.
Recent leaks from Moore’s Law is Dead outlined how Sony is pushing developers to utilize the newly introduced low-power mode on the PS5 to test optimizations for the PS6 handheld. Offering an update on the situation, the leaker now claims that Sony is prioritizing low-power mode over PS5 Pro support.
According to the leaker, PlayStation patched low-power mode for all of its PS5 SDKs, even for those as old as version 1.0. For context, the latest development kits support version 12.0, and the source claims that Sony did not show this level of support for the PS5 Pro.
In the past, developers had to update to the latest SDKs to work on PS5 Pro support for their games. This discrepancy highlights how Sony is now focusing on low-power mode support to a greater degree. It is also said that further iterations of low-power mode are on the way.
Sony seems to be encouraging developers to run games using just 8 CPU threads, likely in an attempt to cut back on resources needed for big games. Elsewhere, the leak outlines that documents related to low-power mode reference different CPU configurations, further hinting at the PS6 handheld.
“New operation modes may be supported in the future and applications may run in enviroments with different available CPU configurations.” – Moore’s Law is Dead
The leaker further mentioned that PlayStation plans to support new CPU architectures with low-power mode, perfectly lining up with the implications of the PS6 handheld using a newer AMD Zen CPU in the future.
As for the PS5 Pro, Sony is also expected to offer a major upgrade to the console with a new iteration of PSSR next year. Still, it is very interesting to see PlayStation potentially shifting focus to its handheld over the recently released PS5 Pro.
