Sony backtracks on PS5 'world's fastest console' claim, as competition looms

Will the PS5 be the most powerful console on the market? Possibly – but while a job listing by Sony Interactive Entertainment had referred to the next-gen PlayStation 5 as the "world's fastest console", it seems like Sony's decided to reconsider its claim.

The job listing in question was for a Senior Cloud Engineering Manager, originally saying that the successful applicant would be helping "to build next generation cloud infrastructure", and "will also be one of the leaders of an elite team that is super excited to launch the upcoming world's fastest console (PS5) in 2020."

Now, though, all mention of the PS5 has been removed, simply saying that the role will involve "managing distributed systems that are powering 100+ million PS4 consoles that deliver immersive gaming experiences."

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Not all about power

It's not overly surprising to see the claim removed; once the listing was being widely circulated in the news, Sony would have to either backup or backtrack on its claim, which is difficult to support so far from the release of the PS5 and its competitor, the Xbox Scarlett. (Microsoft also has the advantage on this front with the Xbox One X being more powerful than the PS4 Pro.)

Dev kits for both consoles are out in the wild, but iterative changes could be made to hardware of software in response to any issues experienced by devs – not to mention the actual console design.

We know a decent amount about the technical capabilities of both consoles, with drip-feed announcements on everything from 8K capability, ray-tracing, and solid-state drives looking to elevate both the PS5 and Xbox Scarlett above their current-generation counterparts. They even share the same Zen 2 and Navi architecture on the processing side.

As ever, we expect the console performances to be somewhat equivalent – and questions over exclusive games and the general ecosystem likely to be more of a differentiating factor, but we'll be keeping our eye close to the ground for anything that could give one console an edge over the other.

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Via DigitalTrends