The core graphics silicon for Sony PlayStation 6 and Xbox Helix consoles has now taped out, according to an often-reliable tech leaker. If that’s true, it means they’ve passed the final stage of their design process, ready for mass production. Not only that, but it looks as though Xbox will have the upper hand when it comes to raw processing power.
These claims were made by regular hardware leaker Kepler_L2, who is on fire at the rumour mill right now. Answering queries about the new hardware on the Neogaf forums, Kepler_L2 said “both are taped out” when asked about the new consoles’ chips.
Perhaps more importantly, the leaker also provided some insight into expected throughput for the new chips. The thread’s original post and title stated that PS6 would offer throughput of 80 TFLOPS, and even outperform the RTX 5080. When one user asks Kepler_L2 if this is “bullshit,” the leaker replies that the actual figure is half that, at 40 TFLOPS, while the Helix crunches though 56 TFLOPS.
Referring to trillion floating point operations per second, TFLOPS give an indication of the peak raw number crunching power of a chip. Given that both the PS6 and Xbox Helix are expected to use AMD Zen 6 CPU cores and RDNA 5 GPUs, it looks as though they will be architecturally comparable. In that’s indeed the case, then the Microsoft would be the more powerful model by 40%, based on these figures.
For some points of comparison, an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT is rated at 48.7 TFLOPS for FP32 single-precision graphics work, while the standard 9070 sits 36.1 TFLOPS. Meanwhile, an RTX 5080 can crunch through 56.28 TFLOPS.
However, bear in mind that Nvidia’s GPU is based on a very different architecture to the AMD ones, with differences in ray tracing and AI-processing abilities. Measuring performance in TFLOPS is a crude calculation when you’re comparing devices based on different architectures.
As we’ve learned from previous console generations, though, there’s more to success than big numbers. After all, Nintendo’s Wii beat both the Xbox 360 and PS3 in terms of sales, while offering only a fraction of the graphics and CPU power. Ultimately, this race is going to be down to game support and price, with spiralling RAM prices likely to have a significant impact on the latter. In fact, the PS6 already apparently costs Sony $960 to make.
All of which means we’re unlikely to see either of these consoles any time soon. As always with leaks and rumours, bear in mind that none of the above has been officially confirmed by either Sony or Microsoft, so take it all with a pinch of salt for the moment.
