As details about AMD's upcoming chips continue to emerge, it's inevitable that some leaks will contain clues about Sony and Microsoft's next-gen consoles. A recently revealed photo of the chip has sparked a new round of speculation about the devices, which both companies plan to launch in the next few years.
Reliable tipster KeplerL2 recently said that a newly exposed chip photo is likely to show the APU of Microsoft's next-generation Xbox game console. The chip is based on AMD's upcoming Zen 6 CPU architecture, perhaps hinting at the core specs of the device.
YouTube channel Moore's Law is Dead recently shared a colorful diagram of an APU AMD is working on, codenamed "Magnus." Its unique configuration - the Zen 6 CPU core is integrated into a 144mm square SoC chip, which is also equipped with a huge 264mm square graphics chip - coupled with the "semi-custom" classification, indicates that this chip will most likely be used in the upcoming game console.
While Moore's Law Is Dead speculates that Magnus could be the PlayStation 6's processor, Kepler thinks it's more likely to be an Xbox APU, and here's why. First, it looks larger and more expensive than the type of chip PlayStation designer Mark Cerny usually favors. Second, Kepler claims that Sony's yet-to-be-announced codename for the PS6 APU continues the company's tradition of drawing characters from William Shakespeare's plays. The chip will reportedly debut under a sixth codename that Sony borrowed from The Tempest.
Magnus has three Zen 6 cores and eight Zen 6c cores, for a total of 11 cores, based on AMD's new CPU architecture. Kepler speculates that it will run on a 10-core, 20-thread architecture, with one core set aside for binning. While the GPU compute units aren't shown in the image, Kepler believes the chip will contain 80 compute units, up from the PlayStation 5 Pro's 60.
Another clue that the Magnus is an Xbox chip is its massive 384-bit memory bus. Sony has been favoring a 256-bit bus for all PlayStation 4 and 5 models, while Microsoft's Xbox One X uses a 384-bit bus and the Series X comes with a 320-bit bus.
Kepler has previously claimed that both the PS6 and next-gen Xbox will be powered by AMD's upcoming UDNA graphics architecture, which will replace the RDNA 4 architecture found in the recently released Radeon RX 90 series graphics cards. This new architecture should bring significant improvements in ray tracing and machine learning compared to RDNA 4 and the RDNA 2 chips used in the PS5 and Xbox Series X.