Sony won’t announce the PlayStation 5 anytime soon, but that isn’t stopping the company from teasing its next-generation console. Sony’s lead architect Mark Cerny revealed in an interview last month a few details about the unreleased console, and AMD announced a few days ago that it’s going to make the console’s next CPU and GPU chips that will help out with Sony’s “secret sauce.” A new report now reveals the PS5 will have an “ultra high-speed” SSD — the kind of component that could eliminate loading screens altogether.
“An ultra-high-speed SSD is the key to our next generation,” a Sony spokesperson told PlayStation Official Magazine for the June 2019 edition (via WCCFTech). “Our vision is to make loading screens a thing of the past, enabling creators to build new and unique gameplay experiences.”
That’s very much in line with what we heard in April from Cerny who demoed the feature by loading the same copy of Spider-Man on a PS4 Pro and a PS5 devkit. The Pro needed 15 seconds to load the content, compared to just 0.8 seconds for the new machine. That’s hardly surprising considering that a SSD will breath new life into virtually any device, making everything run incredibly fast. Not to mention that SSDs are the norm now on most laptops and desktops, although the latter also get SSD and HDD combos.
It’s unclear at this time how Sony will tackle storage on the PS4, and whether users will get a pure SSD experience or some SSD/HDD hybrid. That said, prices for SSDs have been falling rapidly in recent years, and high-capacity SSDs might become the norm on all sorts of devices, next-gen consoles included. Even so, SSDs are still more expensive than traditional HDDs.
The PS4 Pro with 1TB of HDD storage sells for $399.
