It's still incredibly difficult to get your hands on a PS5 right now. While buyers are still struggling to find a system out in the wild, it appears Sony is doing its best to try and alleviate at least some of the restocking woes plaguing retailers.
In fact, there may be a resurgence of PS5 stock in the coming months, if a new report is to be believed.
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The report alleges that Sony is planning to ship between 16.8 million and 18 million units in 2021, which will be possible following an increase in the units' supply stream. Digitimes claims Sony initially shipped 3.4 million PlayStation 5 units in its first month of availability.
That number is about to rise significantly going forward, thanks to more plentiful availability of the components required to put a PS5 into production. That means PS5 restocks could be coming in full force, hopefully putting something of an end to the need to buy systems from scalpers or stalking in-stock alerts around the clock.
Digitimes says AMD, which contributes custom 7nm CPUs for the PS5, secured additional capacity from semiconductor foundry TSMC to ramp up production. This should help monthly service production increase by 40 to 50%, which translates to a whopping 1.4-1.5 million units in 2021. That’s a million units more than 2020's production numbers, which will no doubt help quell the demand for PS5s at least by a bit.
The CPUs are based on AMD's Ryzen Zen 2 architecture, with Radeon RDNA2 GPU. Both China's Tongfu Microelectronics and Taiwan's Silicon Precision Industries will split manufacturing duties on the back end as a 70/30 split. Sony is planning to earmark more PS5s for Asian territories after January 2021 thanks to these additional components, which will undoubtedly help ease the frustration buyers are feeling around the world from being unable to join in on the latest console generation.
Previous reports indicated that Sony had been planning to ship 10 million PS5 units ahead of March 2021, so the 3.4 million number does pan out. Previously, Sony had planned only for around 5 and 6 million units shipped by March, but changed course with demand on the rise.
With additional components going into getting more PS5 units on shelves and into the hands of customers, it looks like more users will finally be able to experience the system firsthand for themselves. In our PS5 review, we awarded the PS5 4.5 stars, calling it "the future of console gaming."
"If you manage to pick a PS5 up now, know that you’ll be treated to a true next-gen experience complete with advanced haptics, beautiful graphics and almost zero friction between you and the games you want to play."
If Digitimes' sources are correct, sentiments like "managing" to grab a PS5 could perhaps be a thing of the past soon enough.
