Where does this leave PlayStation 4K Neo?
It's a remarkable turnabout. A good portion of PlayStation 4's success has been down to its spec advantage over Xbox One, combined with a focus on the hardcore player. Sony's technological advantage will be gone with the next wave of hardware - we already know that it cannot support true 4K resolution on cutting-edge games, because we've seen the internal documents that outline Sony's upscaling strategies for 4K display support (more on that soon). It's also unfeasible for Sony to produce a radically revised Neo - the silicon has been designed, developer kits have gone out. Matching Scorpio would require scrapping Neo's existing processor completely.
Just about the only option available to Sony is the route Microsoft chose for Xbox One in the face of PS4's higher specification - overclocking the processor. It could inch the Neo a little closer to the target Scorpio spec, but hitting 6TF there is off the table: Sony would need a 40 CU Polaris 10 clocked at 1.2GHz to hit the same level. And that wouldn't address the 100GB/s bandwidth deficit or the 4GB memory gap we suspect will separate Neo and Scorpio.
But there is an elephant in the room here: price. Microsoft's brief to AMD in producing this behemoth of a semi-custom design looks pretty obvious - to create the most powerful console possible. The GPU is more powerful and it's going to be larger, which means it's going to be more expensive to produce. Meanwhile, assuming we're right about the 4GB of additional memory, that's not going to be cheap either - when we attended AMD's Munich launch event for Fury X and the Radeon 300 series, we were told that adding an additional 4GB of GDDR5 to the R9 390/390X cost around them around $30 per unit. In short, we would not be surprised to see Scorpio cost significantly more than Neo - maybe even $100 more.
But there's certainly going to be pressure on Sony here - particularly as its next console is targeted at the hardcore player, who wants the very best. If Neo launches this year, it'll have a healthy headstart over Scorpio. However, if we're looking at a March 2017 launch, many may consider until Scorpio appears - especially as the new hardware stands to deliver a tangibly more impressive technological upgrade over the established PlayStation 4.
