The console formerly know as PS4K or PS4 Neo will arrive roughly at the end of November, times just right for the Christmas season. French wholesaler Innelec Multimedia shared this info and mentioned the release date.
Seeing as Innelec is a major French video games distributor and wholesaler, this could be factual. The date lines up with the Tokyo Game Show in September as well.
The upcoming upgraded PlayStation 4 is tagged under Codename NEO and is based upon an upgraded CPU, GPU and RAM. The custom SoC chip that empowers it all will get 8 CPU cores, running at 2.10 GHz; and an embedded GPU (IGP) featuring 36 compute units based on "Next-generation Graphics CoreNext" architecture from AMD.
That last bit is interesting as next-gen obviously suggests a new architecture and thus that in fact could be Polaris. A Neo SoC would be far cheaper and easier to make the custom SoC with a 28nm fab though. But granted the 36 next-gen GCN compute units (x 64 stream processors per cluster) sound very familiar and close to Polaris10 "Ellesmere" chip with a stream processor count of 2304, double over the 1152 from the current PlayStation 4.
| Original PS4 | NEO | |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | 8 Jaguar Cores at 1.6 GHz | 8 Jaguar Cores at 2.1 GHz |
| GPU | AMD GCN, 18 CUs at 800 MHz | Next-gen AMD GCN, 36 CUs at 911 MHz |
| Memory | 8 GB GDDR5, 176 GB/s | 8 GB GDDR5, 218 GB/s |
Sony offers suggestions for reaching 4K/UltraHD resolutions for NEO mode game builds, but they're also giving developers a degree of freedom with how to approach this. 4K TV owners should expect the NEO to upscale games to fit the format, but one place Sony is unwilling to bend is on frame rate. Throughout the documents, Sony repeatedly reminds developers that the frame rate of games in NEO Mode must meet or exceed the frame rate of the game on the original PS4 system.
Neo at 4K would be a Ultra HD supported mode, yet most if not all rendered content would be upscaled.
Playstation 4 Neo Arrives End September
