While we wait for more details on the PS5, we continue to scrape the internet for any scraps of news we can find about the upcoming console. If the Holiday 2020 release date holds, then we’re just over half a year from having the PlayStation 5 in our living rooms. The latest details to surface come from the PS5 heatsink patent—or at least a heatsink patent that we presume is for the PS5—that was just published and made public today.
The image above shows an illustration of the heatsink, which may or may not be exactly like the production version (often patent illustrations are not exact but rather communicate the main points of the patent in an exaggerated, easily digestible visual form). It’s also an internal image, so it doesn’t give us any clear hints as to what the PS5 itself will look like.
The “abstract,” or summary of the patent, details some of the more technical aspects of how the heatsink will work, being placed on the “lower surface” of the board which has holes for specific heat conduction paths. The patent notes that this configuration allows for “a higher degree of freedom in a component layout.”
A heatsink (21) is disposed on a lower surface of a circuit board (10). The circuit board (10) has through holes (h1) that penetrate the circuit board (10) in an area (A) where an integrated circuit apparatus (5) is disposed. Heat conduction paths (11) are provided in the through holes (h1). The heat conduction paths (11) connect the integrated circuit apparatus 5 and the heatsink (21). This structure allows for disposition of a component different from the heatsink (21) on the same side as the integrated circuit apparatus (5), thus ensuring a higher degree of freedom in a component layout
This heatsink patent isn’t the complete picture of Sony’s PS5 cooling solution, which is reportedly a “lavish” and unique system costing quite a bit more than typical console cooling components. Mark Cerny hinted at the physical details of the cooling system in his PlayStation 5 tech talk, saying that we’d get a better look at it in the PS5 console teardown coming sometime in the future.
A heatsink may not be all that interesting to the general consumer, but in the absence of anything else PS5 related, we’ll take whatever we can get. Sony’s talked about wanting to better manage power consumption and heat management with the PS5, and this unique component could be a core part of the fancy cooling system that will make sure the higher-powered next-gen console doesn’t run into any overheating issues.
