Its a good gossip week when you see large sites dragging out their stock picture of a launch PS Vita for illustrative purposes. That's usually a sign of more rumours about a next-gen PlayStation Portable, Portal 2, or whatever Sony decides to misname it.
The latest gossip, repeated far and wide, is that the device will be powered by a 3nm-based 15W SoC (system on a chip) from AMD.
In comparison, the Switch 2 is running an 8nm, Nvidia Tegra T239 SoC. with ARM Cortex-A78C CPU and a NV Ampere GPU, all running at around 10 watts.
If Switch 2 can run the likes of Cyberpunk 2077, there's no reason why a next-gen, more efficient and powerful product can run PS5 and PS6 games in a small-screen form.
MAY UPDATE: Latest gossip is a release alongside the PS6, which is slightly better than PlayStation launching in the no-man's land between generations, but there are still way too many questions that Sony won't have an answer too, possibly for years.
Shouldn't A Portable Be, Like, Portable?
However, is that what portable gamers want? If they already have a PlayStation Portal for remote play, surely a PSP2 should be, you know, portable, fitting in a pocket, and able to play your games anywhere in the world, not dependent on a chunky WiFi connection.
The word is current PS5 games will require patching to run smoothly on this future system, and lets face it, many PS5 games are pretty much PS3/4 in terms of visual quality. While PS6 games will likely have native switch-format code built in.
AMD currently offers the Z2 mobile platform, which powers the PlayStation 5, with Zen 5 powering current high-end desktops. The streaming-only PlayStation Portal uses a Snapdragon 680 processor.
By 2026/27 we could be up to the Zen 5 or 6 generation in mobile form, with a lot more grunt, assuming the cooling for reasonable handheld performance can be built up.
The trick will be coding the PS5/PS6 games natively to dial down higher-end visual features or offloading them to AI, or other clever method of maintaining that next-gen look in a lower-power system.
