The power of the PS5 — or a specific chunk of it, anyway — could be coming to 80 pre-built PC systems.
AMD told our sister site Tom’s Hardware that its 4700S Desktop Kit — comprising a CPU, motherboard, cooler and RAM — is the backbone of these new desktops. As noted by Hardwareluxxe editor Andreas Schilling, the 4700S Desktop Kit’s processor is suspiciously similar to the custom Ariel CPU inside Sony’s console; so if you haven’t luck with any PS5 restocks, this could be the next best thing.
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The 4700S Desktop Kit’s chip also notably lacks any Ryzen branding, further hinting at origins outside AMD’s usual desktop CPU product line. The real smoking gun, though, is the specs: both Ariel and the 4700S Desktop Kit CPU are octa-core, 16-thread chips with Zen 2 cores, and both use GDDR6 for system RAM instead of the much more common DDR4.
Sony PlayStation 5 (Ariel) vs AMD 4700S Desktop Kit (image: @iFixit & @bodnara) pic.twitter.com/7bAK12l0jhJuly 2, 2021
The main difference is that the 4700S Desktop Kit processor doesn’t have integrated graphics, and is instead intended for the addition of a dedicated graphics card. One possibility is that these chips are PS5 processors with the integrated RDNA GPU disabled — if it was working to begin with, as it’s also possible that AMD is repurposing PS5 chips that came out with faulty graphics.
Speaking to Tom’s Hardware, the company maintained that "AMD 4700S Desktop Kit is its own unique solution, designed to address the desire for robust, high-core count performance in the mainstream market.” That’s referring to the 4700S Desktop Kit as a whole, though, not just its processor.
In any case, it looks like the 4700S Desktop Kit is focusing more on affordable and mid-range gaming desktops than ultra-premium systems. Some complete PCs have already appeared on retailers in Asia, costing the equivalent of around $700 or less. So, while the PS5 itself is showcasing its technical talents with games like Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, the AMD 4700S Desktop Kit is forming the basis of entry-level PCs.
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