What You Can Expect From The New PlayStation Portable Hardware According To Leaks

It's been a long time since Sony was one of the hottest names in gaming handhelds. For that, you'd need to travel back in time to the halcyon days of the PlayStation Portable, a device that was right at the top of many holiday wish lists during its prime. Sony did release the relatively inexpensive PlayStation Portal a couple of years back, but it streams games wirelessly from a feature-packed PS5 rather than running them locally. But handhelds have been staging a major comeback in recent years. It's not just Nintendo's wildly successful Switch and Switch 2, but the Steam Deck and other portable PCs from ASUS, Lenovo, and more. Most recently, Microsoft and ASUS teamed up for the Xbox ROG Ally X, which is unlikely to be the last of its kind. Sony must be feeling the pressure, because it seems ready to join the fray.

New specification leaks suggest that Sony is creating a brand-new gaming handheld to compete with the aforementioned products. Of course, leaks are not product announcements, so any details should be taken with a grain of salt. Even if the information is correct, Sony may change things prior to an official launch. With that said, the leaks are coming from reliable AMD leaker Kepler_L2 on X (formerly Twitter), whose PlayStation 5 Pro leaks turned out to be mostly accurate. If the leaker is right this time around, then the upcoming PlayStation handheld will be competitive with other handhelds on the market, especially the ROG Xbox Ally X. That device relies on AMD hardware much like the PlayStation 5, so it makes sense for Sony to stick with AMD to keep this handheld competitive. Let's dive a bit deeper into the supposed specs.

With the upcoming PlayStation handheld, Sony will reportedly muscle out the Switch 2, though the device will hang in the same ballpark as its Windows-based competition. Specifically, we're looking at an AMD APU with 16 GB of RAM, 16 UDNA compute units  — based on AMD's next-gen architecture  — and 32 ROPs, which are processing units for rendering. It will allegedly be on a 128-bit memory bus and will have a 16-megabyte MALL cache. These specs suggest a processor that lands somewhere between the AMD Ryzen Z2 A found in the ASUS Xbox ROG Ally and the AMD Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme found in the ASUS Xbox ROG Ally X. However, it will reportedly include LPDDR5X memory, which may disappoint those who hoped for LPDDR6, but will nonetheless match the Xbox ROG Ally X. However, the leaker insisted that the newer graphics architecture in this handheld will be much higher performance per compute unit, suggesting this chipset is not merely a modified Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme.

Things get a lot more interesting when you compare these reported specs to the hardware inside the full-sized PlayStation 5. While the big console has double the memory clock of a Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme, as well as more than double the compute units and twice the ROPs of the leaked PlayStation handheld specs. In other words, such a handheld would be a little bit like dividing a PS5's gaming power in half, then adding some newer tech here and there, although RAM is identical. So, what would that actually mean for gaming performance, and what other information are we missing that would give us a better picture of what this rumored Sony gaming handheld could be capable of?

Although we have some rumored specs to work with, we still don't know quite a bit about Sony's rumored PlayStation handheld. The device has a legacy to live up to, since the surprisingly capable PlayStation Portable and PlayStation Vita were coveted devices back in their heydays.

One crucial spec we're missing is the display. The higher its panel's resolution, the fewer the number of games that will run well on the hardware. It's therefore unlikely we'll see Sony go with a 4K display, as even 1080p will challenge some titles running on the leaked specs. However, it's very likely that this device will also include some sort of AI upscaling and frame generation, which will go a long way to close the performance gap if it looks presentable and doesn't introduce noticeable latency to the gameplay.

We also don't know which games to expect on the PlayStation handheld. Sony has made a reduced bandwidth development kit available, which implies a desire on its part for a lot of PS5 games to run on this thing. With so many great handhelds on the market, this one's library could make or break it. If it can run a significant number of fan-favorite PS5 games, it could tempt a lot of customers away from alternatives like the Steam Deck, ASUS Xbox ROG Ally, or the Nintendo Switch 2. But although the PlayStation brand still has a halo, the lack of must-have exclusives has remained a pain point for many PS5 owners. While all the rumored specs are subject to change, they ring truthful given the current state of mobile gaming hardware. What matters most for potential buyers  — and therefore for Sony  – is the execution.