The Next PlayStation Will Be Called PlayStation 5 And Is Hitting Shelves Holiday 2020

Today via a blogpost and an exclusive on Wired, Sony lifted the veil more fully on their successor to the wildly successful PlayStation 4. The PlayStation 5, or PS5, will be hitting shelves Holiday 2020.

The reveal, spread across the PlayStation Blog and an exclusive via Wired, doesn't make mention of how the console itself will look, or even an exact release date and price, but ti does give us plenty of other information to work with. 

What we know:

• The PlayStation 5 (as well as Xbox's Project Scarlett) will use  a CPU base on AMD's Ryzen chips, while the GPU will belong to AMD's new Navi line of graphics processors.
• The PlayStation 5 will include a solid-state drive, no longer relying on the mechanical hard drives of yesteryear. Bluepoint's Marco Thrush is excited about the SSDs, speaking to Wired: "The SSD has me really excited[.] You don't need to do gameplay hacks anymore to artificially slow players down—lock them behind doors, anything like that. Back in the cartridge days, games used to load instantly; we're kind of going back to what consoles used to be."
• Mark Cerny confirms there is some sort of GPU hardware-accelerated ray tracing, but we still don't know how powerful the Navi chip will be driving it, and to what extent console players can expect to see ray-tracing elements in their games. But Cerny wanted to get across this isn't a software-fix, rather enabled with the GPU.
• The PS5 will use 100GB Optical Disks, which uses an optical drive (which doubles as a 4K Bluray player)
• Game installation from a disk is still mandatory, but the PS5 is treating installs differently that you might expect. Cerny mentions allowing "finer-grained access" to your [install] data, meaning you could, as Wired puts it, install only the multiplayer campaign of a game, or installing the whole game, but deleting single player once you've finished the campaign.
• The new controller is similar to the PS4 controller, but will include "adaptive triggers." According to Wired, who has held the controller prototype, these adaptive triggers " can offer varying levels of resistance to make shooting a bow and arrow feel like the real thing—the tension increasing as you pull the arrow back—or make a machine gun feel far different from a shotgun. "
• The controller is ditching the Micro-USB standard and moving to USB-C connections for charging and wired play.
• The new controller incorporates more advanced "haptic feedback." According to Wired, the improved haptics could have been included with the PS4 Pro's Dual Shock 4, but Sony didn't want to create a "split experience."
• According to the PlayStation Blog, these new haptics replace the rumble technology found in controllers since the days of the N64 Rumble Pack. The idea is that with the new haptic feedback versus the traditional rumble, players can feel a "broader range of feedback." This means doing something such as crashing into a wall will feel very different than getting tackled on a football field, to use Jim Ryan's example from the PS Blog.