Over the past month or so, there's been a lot of buzz surrounding Sony's upcoming PlayStation 5 next-gen console, particularly in regards to storage mediums and how SSDs will improve the next generation. What does this have to do with Samsung, you may ask? Well, it turns out that Samsung might be Sony's SSD supplier for the PS5.
The Korean tech giant hosted the Samsung SSD Forum 2019 in Tokyo last week. At the event, the company reportedly confirmed that it is working on a new NVMe SSD solution which should be the perfect fit for gaming consoles. Although the Sony PS5 wasn't outright mentioned on stage, Samsung did show a slide depicting the PS4 along with the caption SSD is required for proper game play.
Now, it could be that Samsung aims to bag both Sony and Microsoft as its SSD customers, but the presence of the PS4 in the aforementioned slide has fueled the idea that at least the Sony PS5 will be taking advantage of this technology once it launches next year.
Samsung's SSD will help to improve load times
It seems like the next-generation of gaming consoles will put a greater emphasis on minimizing load times. Some contenders like Google's Stadia aim to do this by abandoning the traditional console format and relying on cloud computing/streaming instead. On the other hand, Sony, at least, seems to want and achieve higher performance through better (local) hardware, which is arguably the preferred way to go.
Ongoing game consoles like the PlayStation 4 Pro ship with an HDD instead of an SSD, but this is expected to change with the next-gen PS5. There is, of course, a matter of cost to consider. SSD prices have dropped over the years but 1GB of SSD storage still costs a lot more than 1GB of HDD storage, so it will be interesting to see how the next-gen consoles will tackle this issue.
In any case, Samsung's semiconductor division is bound to profit from this apparent collaboration. NAND flash and DRAM sales have slowed down in the first half of the year, and Intel is threatening to take back its top spot from Samsung by the end of 2019 even if the latter company managed to increase its DRAM market share in Q3.
Either way, Sony's gaming division has a very large customer base, and if the PS5 will employ an SSD made by Samsung then the company's semiconductor business is surely going to benefit from it. Even more so if Sony is not going to be the only client and if Microsoft's next-gen console will also rely on Samsung's SSD solution.
