We still don’t know what the PS5 will look like but a recently published patent for its dev kit suggests that Sony is taking cooling and ventilation very seriously in this upcoming generation.
The utility patent, filed by Sony in late 2019 but published on the World Intellectual Property Organisation Database in June 2020, highlights the dev kit’s “plurality of cooling fans” which work with a heat sink in order to improve airflow and keep the console cool.
Although this patent appears to be for the PS5 dev kit—which is unlikely to resemble the final console if previous PlayStation dev kits are anything to go by—previous reports on the PS5 have suggested that its cooling system will be something special.
Keeping cool
Earlier this year, Bloomberg reported that the PS5’s cooling system is “unusually expensive at a few dollars per unit” as Sony has “opted to lavish more on making sure heat dissipation from the powerful chips housed inside the console isn’t an issue.”
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Shortly after that, Sony itself touched on the console’s cooling solution with Mark Cerny noting during the console’s spec deep-dive that the team had to tackle the “engineering challenge of a cost-effective and high-performance cooling solution, designed for” the console which will be running “at essentially constant power” with variable frequencies for its CPU and GPU. Cerny stopped short of revealing specific details of the cooling solution, noting they were being held back for a future teardown.
With all of that considered, while there’s no guarantee that the PS5 dev kit or the cooling system shown in this patent will match up with the final consumer console, it seems likely that Sony has devised a similarly robust solution.
Sony’s PS5 gameplay event that was scheduled for earlier this week was postponed in order to “allow more important voices to be heard” amid the ongoing protests following the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis. However, it has since said that a new date will be announced “soon”.
Whether or not this event will give us a closer look at the design of the PS5 is unknown but with the end of 2020 and the console’s release window fast approaching it’s unlikely we’ll have to wait much longer to see it.
Via LetsGoDigital
