The PS5 Pro isn’t even a year old and we’re already starting to get leaks about the PlayStation 6 and a companion Sony gaming handheld. A new video by tech YouTuber Moore’s Law Is Dead, which claims to be based on a review of some older AMD documentation, shares hardware codenames, early specs, speculation about potential prices, and how Sony’s next console generation could begin as early as mid-2027. For those keeping track at home, that’s only two years away.
Sony has decided to stick with AMD for the chipset powering its next batch of hardware, a detail first reported back in September 2024. Both companies also announced a partnership earlier this year called Project Amethyst to invest in new breakthroughs in AI upscaling technology. With that in mind, Moore’s Law Is Dead clarifies that its latest sourcing for what fans can expect from the PS6 and a new gaming handheld comes from a mix of what Sony and AMD were planning back before 2024 and more recent documentation. Plans can change a lot throughout the course of designing new hardware, and what was the case a couple of years ago or even today might not be the case once both devices actually launch.
With that said, Moore’s Law Is Dead claims the codenames for the new consoles are “Orion” for the PS6 and “Canis” for the PS6-era handheld. He suggests the Orion could be targeting 160W TBP, 8 x Zen 6 (or later) Cores, 40-48 RDNA 5 Compute Units @3GHz, 160-bit or 192-bit bus w/GDDR7 @32GT/z, and three times greater rasterization performance than the PS5. He added that it will be backwards compatible with PS4 and PS5, and the specs suggest a target ship date of mid-2027 to early 2028.
Canis, meanwhile, is looking at 15W TBP, 4 x Zen 6c Cores, 12-20 RDNA 5 Compute Units @ 1.6-2GHz, 128-bit bus w/ LPDDR5X-7500+, and about half the rasterization performance of the PS5. It’s targeting the same release window as the next-gen console and will include a touch screen and a USB-C port with video out, and be backwards compatible with PS4 and PS5 as well. Based on his review of the documentation, he believes the handheld could, if Sony wanted, end up being even smaller than the Switch, which by 2027 will be a decade old.
The broader takeaways for those who aren’t technically inclined, at least from the point of view of Moore’s Law Is Dead, are that Sony is really concerned about pricing in this next console generation, and is willing to sacrifice some performance to keep the new hardware affordable. That suggests a smaller leap from the PS5 Pro to the PS6 than from the PS5 to the PS5 Pro. What that means for how necessary and worthwhile these new consoles feel in two years remains to be seen, but it does suggest Sony is aiming to keep the price of the PS6 in line with where the PS5 is now.
“So, the performance that I’m leaking today, if Sony does end up sticking with it, I think it’s enough to saturate a 4K120 TV with ray tracing cranked up and after that it’s going to be the stronger CPU, the new AI features I’ve heard Sony might be working on that’s going to make it feel next-gen,” the YouTuber said in his latest video.
“It’s not going to be because they can do 4K 160 instead of 4K120. This isn’t a PC. It’s limited by the TVs people use. And the TVs most people use are 4K120 or frankly 4K60. And this will do that easily. And if stopping at the exact limit of what TVs are capable of right now gives you a $400-to-$600 console instead of a $700-to-$1,000 console, that makes total sense in my opinion for the next generation.”