When will a PS5 slim hardware refresh happen?

Not soon IMO, it’s likely that a slim would follow their normal ~3 year pattern. Also hard to form a view when we don’t know how extensive the cooling system is in the PS5. If they’ve had to put an extensive solution in place it will make shrinking it down difficult.

So I guess we need to wait for the promised teardown/technical talk Sony usually give.

The fact that this is taking so long to come gives pause for thought, detailed PS4 interview with Mark Cerny were done in Feb. 2013 and PS4 Pro 6 weeks after it was unveiled.

This is what I have been debating whether a slim model would cut costs enough for Sony to cut the price of the PS5. It is almost accepted fact that Sony is incurring significant losses on the PS5 DE, yet if Microsoft’s prediction holds true then a 5nm process is not going to reduce the cost of the APU and RAM prices is unlikely to come down enough as well. That leaves its power savings, and whether they will be enough to reduce it to a point where Sony can forgo the costly cooling solution, and for SSD prices coming down, which they should.

It is entirely possible that a slim PS5 will come but all it will enable is for Sony to stop losing money on the PS5, or reduce it significantly, not to enable them to cut the price to any significant degree.

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It’s all going to depend on how this gen plays out. If one of the consoles isn’t doing well or if the games aren’t performing (resolution/FPS) well, then you’ll see a revision come out quicker.

I’m guessing 2 years.

In fact, they’re already probably working feverishly on it as we speak.

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End 2022 is my bet. Justifying the release at 10 millions players. Anniversary or celebration thing some kind of marketing speak.

PS1 Slim - 2000 (5 years after NA launch) PS2 Slim - 2004 (4 years after NA launch) PS3 Slim - 2009 (3 years after NA launch) PS4 Slim - 2016 (3 years after NA launch)

So I’d say 2023.

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Answering the OP question: As soon they can make one for a lower price.

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A lower price does not necessarily mean smaller. I wonder if the inevitable slim model will be 5nm or 3nm?

Wow, I thought the PS5 wouldn’t look outdated for at least a year like the Xbox One OG but my god, it looks outdated before it hit the store shelf.

Its like really cheap gamer nerd design, the fact that it’s so big is what makes it horrible. You’re suppose to get smaller as tech progresses, not massively larger.

For sure, but it’s going to be at least 3 years before we see it.

As we know from the hotchips presentation the saving potential by a newer node has drastically decreased due to the higher costs to produce a wafer. I really do not know where they can cut costs here. They went with all the higher end ingredients like USB Gen 3.2, their controller and WIFI 6. Whether USB 3.2 Gen 2 nor WIFI 6 are necessary for the console. A controller don’t need the speed of USB 3.2 and the advantage in speed for external drives with 10 gbps is useless for all the new games make use of the SSD. The WIFI 6 doesn’t add anything to the latency in reducing it, it is just more bandwidth. But bandwidth is not an issue even in modern games. They may hope that the SSD component will get cheaper but I suspect that is not sufficient to make a revised console. But we will see.

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You may not have noticed. As it was clear that the performance crown would be at Xbox a certain group of Sony protagonists started to speculate about a more beefier PS5 Pro. Some fake insiders even claimed it would launch with the PS5 alongside. So, yes, even Sony protagonists think what you wrote.

I personally do not think that way. As many times mentioned the PS5 is a decent console, but with a lot of questions marks arounbd it. The whole fiasco about cross gen and cross gen saves/payment. Not to talk about BC which is still a mystery because nobody has really seen how that plays out. All we have are some really vague statements where you don’t know what to make out of it.

And of course the big elephant in the room: How sustainable is the console under stress load and its high clocks for the GPU.

It might not save them on cost of chip but 5nm can help them make more efficient and less hungry chip. Which could actually result in a slim PS5 afterall.

Ill probably just end up getting one on a black Friday.