- A regular leaker says the chips for the PS6 and Xbox Helix have been ‘taped out’, meaning the design is final for manufacturing
- The leaker claims 56 TFLOPS of power for the Xbox Helix and 40 TFLOPS for the PS6
- That compared to 16.7 TFLOPS on the PS5 Pro and 12 TFLOPS on the Xbox Series X
The launches of next-gen console hardware from Sony and Microsoft are edging ever closer, and the latest rumor doing the rounds suggests that the chips for both the PlayStation 6 and what’s being called the Xbox Helix are now ‘taped out’ — as in, finalized for submission to chip manufacturers.
This comes from well-known tipster KeplerL2 , who also predicts 40 TFLOPS of performance for the Sony hardware and 56 TFLOPS for the Microsoft hardware. That’s Tera Floating-Point Operations Per Second, or how many trillions of calculations a processor can do in a single single
While TFLOPS gives us some indication of how powerful these consoles will be, they’re not the whole story, as architecture choices and memory bandwidth will play significant roles too. That said, it seems the Xbox console may have a major edge in terms of raw power — although the Xbox Series X had a 20% edge on TFLOPS over the PS5 back in 2020 too, which didn’t necessarily translate into better-looking games.
Direct comparisons with current generation consoles are tricky, as so many other variables will be changing as well as TFLOPS figures, but TweakTown reports that the PS5 delivers 10.28 TFLOPS, the PS5 Pro offers 16.7 TFLOPS (typical) and 18.05 TFLOPS (peak), and the Xbox Series X can hit 12 TFLOPS.
But how much will it cost?
Both the Xbox Helix and the PlayStation 6 are expected to be based on the AMD Zen 6 family of CPUs and the AMD RDNA 5 GPU architecture, if previous leaks are to be believed, and there has been talk of 30GB of RAM being packed inside the Sony console (no RAM predictions yet for the Microsoft one).
Judging by the ongoing discussion on Reddit, gamers aren’t placing too much stock in these leaked TFLOPS numbers, as they aren’t guaranteed to convert directly into gaming performance. The bigger debate seems to be over how much Sony and Microsoft are going to charge for these next-generation machines.
There are mentions of “an inevitably massive price hike” while another user is prepared to “say goodbye to affordable console hardware” in this generation. As we’ve already seen with the Steam Machine, the ongoing shortage of memory chips is driving up prices across the board, including in gaming hardware.
As for when we might actually see these consoles, don’t hold your breath: experts say a launch before 2028 is unlikely, even if the design for the main processor chips have now been finalized. We’ll just have to fill the time exploring everything Grand Theft Auto 6 has to offer in the meantime.
