Is Sony’s Secret Sauce A Customized SSD For The PlayStation 5?

According to a new patent, Sony’s SSD for the PlayStation 5 isn’t a casual one. Sony is using a customized SSD for the PlayStation 5.

New patent reveals that Sony is using a customized SSD for the PlayStation 5 for better read/write speeds and faster loading times.

Just quite recently, Sony held its Corporate Strategy Meeting in Tokyo for the fiscal year 2019 in which the company showcased next-gen PlayStation 5’s faster loading times thanks to its SSD.

As demonstrated in the meeting, PlayStation 5 takes full advantage of a new SSD that allows it to load entire levels in Spider-Man 0.83 seconds.

According to a new patent discovered by ResetEra user gofreak, Sony’s SSD for the PlayStation 5 isn’t a casual one. The patent shows just how much Sony has customized PS5’s SSD.

Gofreak detailed some of the interesting points from Sony’s patent in his ResetEra threat:

– SRAM instead of DRAM inside the SSD for lower latency and higher throughput access between the flash memory controller and the address lookup data. The patent proposes using a coarser granularity of data access for data that is written once, and not re-written – e.g. game install data. This larger block size can allow for address lookup tables as small as 32KB, instead of 1GB. Data read by the memory controller can also be buffered in SRAM for ECC checks instead of DRAM (because of changes made further up the stack, described later).

– The SSD’s read unit is ‘expanded and unified’ for efficient read operations.

– A secondary CPU, a DMAC, and a hardware accelerator for decoding, tamper checking and decompression.

Of course, the main differences in SRAM and DRAM are the modes of integrated-circuit. SRAM is comparatively faster than DRAM; hence SRAM is used for cache memory while DRAM is used for main memory.

These are insanely powerful specs for a console. Clearly, the continued rumors of PS5’s specs have had an effect on people. According to one survey, 64.7% of people are already hooked on buying Sony’s next-gen PlayStation 5 console.

And that makes sense when you consider just how many features PlayStation 5 is offering. The PS5 has:

  • Backward Compatibility
  • Hyper-realistic Graphics
  • Faster Loading speed
  • A ton of game variety
  • 3D Sound
  • Online services
  • VR
  • Online cloud gaming and streaming
  • And more that hasn’t been disclosed yet

Even though Sony is skipping E3 this year, you can still expect a PlayStation 5 announcement to take place at PSX 2019.