A YouTuber has managed to bring a cut-down version of the PlayStation 5’s hardware to life on a custom AMD BC250 board bought from China. Running Linux, the unit surprisingly booted and delivered playable performance across several modern games, effectively turning PS5 silicon into a working gaming PC.
A modder has managed to get their hands on what is being sold as the PlayStation 5’s graphics card, or more precisely, the AMD BC250 APU, a cut-down version of the PS5’s custom chip, from a Chinese seller for just £96, or roughly $120. Against all odds, the unit not only powered up but successfully ran multiple PC games on Linux, including GTA V, Cyberpunk 2077, and Counter-Strike 2.
The available RAM is pretty anemic, but that sounds pretty cheap for a fully functional PC with a GPU. It mentions an RDNA2 GPU, which that family apparently has had successfully TensorFlow-DirectML running on it.
Electricity consumption would be an issue, but I wonder if these would make good machine learning training compute nodes.
Perfect platform for playing anything thats not ultra bleeding edge high performance.
and lets face it, theres a hundred thousand more of those games, than there are of the ultra bleeding edge games.
For gaming I wonder if it could be underclocked and undervolted to get the power consumption down. Since its essentially RAM starved for alot of other games, it may not be able to take full advantage of the CPU/GPU and a slowed-down, but lower power consumption unit, might still play games of certain era’s just fine.