Mark Cerny and AMD’s Project Amethyst: Redefining PlayStation 6 Hardware through AI and Co-Engineering

Mark Cerny and AMD’s Project Amethyst might be one of the most significant hardware collaborations of the next gaming era – but as Sony’s legendary architect himself admits, the true impact won’t be measurable until developers start building real games on it. This partnership, which deepens the already long-standing relationship between Sony Interactive Entertainment and AMD, was officially refreshed in a recent nine-minute presentation where Cerny and AMD’s Jack Huynh introduced three major technologies: Neural Arrays, Radiance Cores, and Universal Compression.

Each promises to redefine how consoles handle computation, lighting, and data – but all are still in the simulation phase.

In an extended follow-up shared via Digital Foundry, Cerny explained that Project Amethyst isn’t just a hardware evolution; it’s a paradigm shift in how PlayStation collaborates with AMD. Until now, Sony’s hardware teams had largely focused on building unique, PlayStation-specific chips. Amethyst changes that. The new strategy emphasizes co-development and co-engineering directly on AMD’s roadmap, ensuring that future consoles – including the anticipated PlayStation 6 – will share a technological foundation with PCs and laptops. This approach, Cerny believes, will make it easier for developers to adopt and optimize cutting-edge features across multiple platforms, amplifying their impact.

“In the past, we created custom tech just for PlayStation,” Cerny noted in his correspondence. “Now, we’re working alongside AMD to shape technologies that can scale beyond consoles. Developers won’t just build for us; they’ll build for the entire ecosystem.” It’s a quiet but profound acknowledgment that the lines between console and PC development are fading, and Amethyst could become a unifying framework rather than a closed system.

However, Cerny also tempered the excitement with realism. Features like Universal Compression and Radiance Cores may sound revolutionary, but their benefits will only become clear once developers get their hands on early prototypes. “With these technologies, we know great stuff is coming,” he said, “but it’s difficult – maybe impossible – to quantify until developers experiment.” Universal Compression in particular could prove vital as memory bandwidth improvements plateau. If it works as intended, it could reduce data size for high-resolution assets and even optimize how machine learning models like FSR or PSSR store feature maps in memory – potentially making ML-driven upscaling faster and cheaper.

Radiance Cores, meanwhile, represent AMD’s push toward dedicated hardware for advanced ray tracing, possibly competing with NVIDIA’s RT cores. These units could drastically improve lighting realism, reflection accuracy, and scene global illumination. Yet Cerny stressed that the true advantage will depend on how engines evolve to use them. As he put it, “We’ll need to get prototypes into developers’ hands to understand just how much they can level up their engines.”

The takeaway is that Sony and AMD are deliberately future-proofing. Rather than chasing rasterization performance – still improving but no longer the centerpiece – both companies are doubling down on machine learning and ray tracing. That aligns with persistent rumors that the PlayStation 6 will feature up to a 12x improvement in ray tracing compared to PS5, but only about a 3x boost in traditional rendering. Such an imbalance reflects a new design philosophy: realism through computation rather than brute-force pixel power.

Universal Compression also reflects the growing complexity of modern assets. Cerny admitted that bandwidth scaling is hitting hard limits, and smarter data handling is the only sustainable solution. With game sizes ballooning and visual fidelity expectations rising, a leap in compression efficiency could be as impactful as any GPU speed increase. These kinds of features point toward an ecosystem where AI-driven optimization and smarter memory management matter more than clock speeds or teraflops.

Still, it’s important to remember that everything shown so far exists only as simulation. Project Amethyst is an early glimpse into what Sony’s next-generation development kit might enable – not a final product. But for an industry craving innovation beyond higher frame rates, Cerny’s message was clear: the future of gaming performance lies not in raw specs, but in how smartly the hardware and software learn to work together.

If PlayStation 6 indeed arrives around 2027 as leaks suggest, it could be the first console designed around this AI-centric vision from the ground up – where light, sound, and texture fidelity aren’t just rendered, but predicted and compressed intelligently. Whether that will be the revolution gamers are hoping for or another incremental upgrade depends, as Cerny says, on the developers who bring these simulations to life.