Only four years into the life of the PS4 and everyone is already talking about the PlayStation 5, after the PS4 Pro of course. Naturally, with all the buzz surrounding the inevitable Playstation 5, many people have already begun speculating about the PlayStation 5 Release Date and how powerful it will be.
PlayStation 5 will be much more powerful than the PS4 Pro
The analyst who predicted the existence of the PS4 Pro and PS4 Slim has cast his predictions for the release date for the Sony next-gen console, the PS5. However, his predictions for a 2018 release don’t make sense because releasing a next gen console so close to the PS4 Pro will make Sony bury themselves. We predict a release date close to 2020 with a difference of a year more or less.
Because the PS4 Pro is not a New Generation, we think SONY could release the beast powerful PS5 in 2020. It will most probably be a big jump forward in technology. Native 4k 60fps “high settings” as a standard because native 4k 60fps gaming is very expensive right now. They should wait til 2020-2021 to release anything. 2019 is the ABSOLUTE earliest. And completely unrelated but, they really should make the PlayStation 5 backwards compatible as well. Its architecture is likely going to be stupidly close to the ps4 anyways.
A 2018 PlayStation 5 Release Date isn’t so unlikely either
On the other hand, it actually makes sense for a successor to be released in 2018. At about that time 7nm from GloFo and 10 nm from TMSC should be ready and Sony will have to move to those new nodes for economic reasons (cost per transistor). As they will have to go through a process of shrinking the node they might as well make other changes in architecture, like more GCN cores, more or more powerful CPU cores, and similar things. As PS 5 is likely to keep x86_64 architecture on CPU side and GCN on GPU side backward compatibility with software will also be easy to handle.
Finally, we should keep in mind one of the reasons PS3 and Xbox 360 lasted that long because initially they were sold at an enormous loss. In the case of PS3, that was hundreds of dollars per unit sold. Because of that, they had to be kept in the market for years to amortize that initial development cost and selling at a loss per unit. With Xbone and PS 4 loss per unit sold was far smaller, and development cost was also cheaper, this allows them to amortize the cost far quicker and be ready to launch successors much faster. So, a 2018 PlayStation 5 Release Date can make sense.