Project Cronos: New leak sheds light on Sony’s upcoming cloud gaming technology

Sony continues to maintain its stoic silence about Project Q, its first-ever Remote Play-only handheld. Thankfully, recent leaks have talked about its battery capacity and even showed off a working prototype. Trusted leaker Tom Henderson, who first spoke about Project Q, now has some new information about yet another Sony endeavour titled Project Cronos.

It is supposedly the “next generation” of Sony’s streaming architecture tailor-made for the PlayStation 5. Development of Project Cronos began five years ago but was hamstrung due to the complexities involving the console’s SSD, prompting it to redesign the technology from the ground up. It is now based on PCIe NTB (Non-Transparent Bridge), which connects the memory of multiple systems over the same PCI-e fabric. More information about how it works can be found on Nvidia’s dedicated web page.

As a result, Sony’s servers (codenamed Kura) can now hit read speeds of 5 GB/s with sub-1 ms latency. On paper, this should significantly enhance end users’ cloud-based gaming experience, although a large portion of it will likely depend on the internet connection. Project Cronos is designed to attract more users to Sony’s PlayStation Cloud service, which is expected to launch later this year.

With recent promotions boasting that one can play Starfield on a Samsung smart TV without a console, Sony will undoubtedly pick up the advertising blitz for Project Cronos and likely launch it alongside Project Q. Whether or not one can use Project Q to access Sony’s cloud-based game library remains to be seen.

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