- PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X are still on track to launch in holiday 2020, chipset provider AMD confirmed during a recent meeting with analysts.
- The coronavirus outbreak isn’t expected to delay the launch of the PS5 or Xbox Series X into 2021, despite factories shutting down all over the world.
- Supply issues may still arise if the outbreak isn’t contained by the time production ramps up.
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Although nothing trumps the health and safety concerns that have sprung up in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, it’s impossible to ignore how substantial the impact has been on the tech industry as well. From canceled conferences and gatherings to potential delays of upcoming products, we won’t know the extent of the damage that has been done until the virus has been contained, which could take months. Therefore, it’s no real surprise that some have wondered whether or not the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X will actually ship on time.
Both the PS5 and Xbox Series X are slated to launch this holiday season, but with all of the closures and quarantines around the world due to the spread of COVID-19, it seems possible that the production of the new consoles could be affected. Thankfully, we now have at least some evidence that the consoles are still on schedule.
During AMD’s Financial Analyst Day presentation on Thursday, Rick Bergman, AMD’s Executive Vice President of Computing and Graphics, showed the following slide to the audience in attendance and those watching the stream from home which seems to reinforce the idea that both the PS5 and Xbox Series X will be ready for holiday 2020. “NEXT GENERATION ON TRACK” doesn’t really leave a lot of room for interpretation:
Of course, the consoles being on track to ship this year is important to AMD, as both Sony and Microsoft will use the company’s GPU architecture to power the next-generation devices. Microsoft reiterated this point in a recent blog post covering many of the specifications and feature of the Xbox Series X:
Xbox Series X is our most powerful console ever powered by our custom designed processor leveraging AMD’s latest Zen 2 and RDNA 2 architectures.
And here’s what PS5 lead system architect Mark Cerny told Wired last April when the console was announced:
PlayStation’s next-generation console ticks all those boxes, starting with an AMD chip at the heart of the device. […] The CPU is based on the third generation of AMD’s Ryzen line and contains eight cores of the company’s new 7nm Zen 2 microarchitecture. The GPU, a custom variant of Radeon’s Navi family, will support ray tracing, a technique that models the travel of light to simulate complex interactions in 3D environments.
Difficulties and surprises may lie ahead as the world contends with the viral outbreak, but, at least for now, AMD is confident that Sony and Microsoft will have their next-gen consoles on store shelves before the end of the year. The real question is whether or not supply will be able to meet demand.
