PlayStation 5's most impressive power feature isn't what you'd expect

There's still quite a bit we don't know about the PlayStation 5, but today, Sony is discussing some new environmentally-friendly features it'll have. This reveal comes as Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO Jim Ryan announced his plans to join other gaming industry leaders in making "formal commitments to contribute to the efforts of the UN Environment committee through a new partnership, the Playing for the Planet alliance."

In a post to the PlayStation Blog today, Ryan explains that Sony has already made "substantial commitments and efforts" in making the PlayStation 4 more power efficient in a variety of ways. Some of these solutions include implementing suspend-to-RAM power modes and tapping into more efficient SoC architectures. To date, Ryan says that SIE has avoided almost 16 million tons of carbon emissions, which should grow to 29 million metric tons over the next decade.

Sony will also be taking an efficiency approach to power management in the PlayStation 5, with Ryan noting that the console will allow players to suspend gameplay while using much less power. This low-power suspend state will use around 0.5 W of energy, so Ryan says that if one million PlayStation 5 owners opt to use it, it'll "save equivalent to the average electricity use of 1,000 US homes."

On the operations side of things, Sony will carry out a carbon footprint assessment of its business and report on the efficiency of its data centers. It'll also work alongside climate experts and others in the industry to create resources for game developers who may want to make sustainability a focus on in their games and look into creating PlayStation VR games and applications that can raise awareness about climate change.

At this moment, the new energy-saving suspend state in the PlayStation 5 is one of the few things we know about it. Sony hasn't talked much about the console yet, but we expect the reveals and info drops to increase in the coming months. We're expecting the PlayStation 5 to land at some point before the 2020 holiday season, so we'll keep an eye out for more details.