Bear with us here, we’re about to get technical and dive down a deep rabbit hole that might hint at what Sony’s working with for their next-gen architecture. As originally discovered by Phoronix, Simon Pilgrim, a principal programmer at Sony, has been “working on AMD Ryzen LLVM compiler improvements.” If that doesn’t make a lot of sense to you, it basically means that Sony has someone actively working on improvements and hardware support for CPU technology that isn’t currently available in any PlayStation products. Apparently Pilgrim has entered numerous improvements, cleanups, and changes to the znver1 code within LLVM, which points to this being much more than a one-off bit of code work.
Sony is already working with AMD and has been for years. The PS4 uses a modified AMD Jaguar CPU. It’s not too far fetched to think they might transition to another CPU within the AMD family for the next iteration of the PlayStation, and Pilgrim’s work improving the Ryzen CPU shows that Sony has an investment in this technology. With this evidence in hand, Ryzen could be the basis for the PlayStation 5, or whatever Sony ends up calling their next console. Digital Foundry points out that Pilgrim is currently working with the first generation of Ryzen core, even though the estimated 2020 release that most people estimate as the next PlayStation release would line up better with the second generation of Ryzen tech. CPU manufacturers often focu...