Sony's upcoming PlayStation 5 console has been designed to be more Earth-friendly and energy efficient, particularly when it is in sleep mode.
The move is a part of Sony's bid to lower its power consumption as the company partners with the United Nations and other industry leaders in the "Playing for the Planet" alliance.
A More Environmentally Friendly PS5
Jim Ryan, President and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, made the announcement of an energy-saving PlayStation 5 on a blog post titled "PlayStation Joins Forces with the United Nations to Combat Climate Change."
"I am also very pleased to announce the next generation PlayStation console will include the possibility to suspend gameplay with much lower power consumption than PS4 (which we estimate can be achieved at around 0.5 W)," Ryan wrote on the blog. "If just one million users enable this feature, it would save equivalent to the average electricity use of 1,000 US homes."
According to Engadget, the company is able to make its new generation console more energy-efficient with "an integrated system-on-a-chip in which the components are held on a single substrate, and it will also offer an energy-saving suspend-to-RAM mode."
With this, players can suspend their gameplay and put their consoles on standby while consuming a lot less power than the current generation PS4, which runs with as much as 8.5 watts on standby. The new PlayStation 5 is expected to significantly lower this number to about half a watt.
However, the power-saving feature of the new console appears to be an optional setting instead of a default one, according to the Verge. If so, players would have to make sure that their PlayStation 5 is set to the feature before enjoying the benefits of the more power-efficient console.
Sony's Commitment To The Climate And The Planet
The PlayStation 4 and Xbox have both been called out for consuming so much energy on their respective standby modes. While Sony has worked on improving the PS4's energy profile over the years, the new feature on the PlayStation 5 is bound to be a huge leap.
Beyond the development of PlayStation 5, the company embraced more efficient technology that allowed it to reduce its power consumption. Sony estimates avoiding carbon emissions of nearly 16 million metric tons, predicting that the next decade will see this number rise to 29 million metric tons.
Moving forward, Sony is planning to conduct carbon footprint assessments on its services and share the energy efficient measures it uses to data centers. Reference information are also in the works to provide accurate data to game developers who are interested in including environmental themes in their games. In the future, there could be PlayStation VR applications to help spread awareness about climate change and related issues.
