Infrared photos show details of PlayStation 5 soc

The smallest details of the system-on-a-chip from Sony’s PlayStation 5 have been visualized for the first time. A Twitter user has put those shots of the soc online and an analysis has been made. Microsoft previously showed details of the chip from the Xbox Series X.

According to Twitter user Fritzchens being Fritz the first pictures quickly and better images will follow later. Fritz uses a microscope with a short-wave infrared camera to reveal details of chips. He takes many such photos of chips and publishes them on Flickr.

Using the new photos, Twitter user Locuza made an interpretation of the chip’s floor plan. However, he says he needs a higher resolution photo to be sure of all the details.

Those shots taken by Fritzchens Fritz, interpretation of floorplan by locuza

The shots show that the cpu cores are positioned on the side, with the compute units of the gpu in the middle. 40 compute units are visible, the gpu uses 36, four are disabled to improve the chip’s yields. According to Locuza, there are differences with, for example, the Zen2 cores of AMD apus, but also many similarities with the chip from the Xbox Series X and S.

Microsoft already showed a die shot of the soc before the release of its new consoles, during a technical presentation. Sony has never released such a detail photo of the chip, nor has it released any chip-level details.