We now have the first information about Sony's upcoming PlayStation 6: it will be powered by AMD chips, according to a Reuters report, as chipmaker Intel has lost the tender to manufacture chips for the next-generation PlayStation. One factor that reportedly led Sony to decide on AMD was to ensure backwards compatibility with the current-generation PlayStation 5.
Sony’s PS5 features an AMD CPU (a custom AMD Zen 2) and GPU (a custom AMD RDNA 2 for the base PS5 and RDNA 3 for the upcoming PlayStation 5 Pro). According to Reuters, the switch to Intel-made chips could have jeopardized backwards compatibility, or at least made it more expensive for Sony engineers to maintain backwards compatibility. The PlayStation 4 also ran on AMD-made processors.
The PlayStation maker has a history of backwards compatibility between consoles. The PlayStation 2 played original PlayStation games right out of the box. Early versions of the PlayStation 3 were also backwards compatible with both of its predecessors. Sony broke its backwards compatibility streak with the PS4, which didn't support PS3 games out of the box but eventually offered access to them via emulation.
Reuters’ report on the PS6 would certainly indicate that Sony intends to offer support for PS5 games on its next-gen console, which hasn’t been announced and doesn’t have a clear launch window. Sony just announced the PS5 Pro last week, with a November launch. The PS6 console is almost certainly still years away, given the seven-year gap between the launch of the PS4 and PS5.
Sony's decision to go with AMD over Intel reportedly dates back to 2022. But the PlayStation maker is likely to have started working on its PS5 successor long before then. According to Shawn Layden, former president of SIE Worldwide Studios, Sony typically “starts[s] “We're working on the next-gen platform almost a day after you launch the current generation,” Layden said in an interview with the What's Up PlayStation podcast: “By the time you launch a product, you already have a team way, way behind you.” […] who is already working on the next version.”