Sony's next handheld might stop forcing you to buy its own branded memory cards, if a leak aired on Moore's Law Is Dead's Broken Silicon podcast holds up. The claim, laid out in a dedicated segment on the show, is that a rumored PS6 portable will support standard SD cards for storage instead of a proprietary format tied to the console. Nobody at PlayStation has said a word about this publicly, so treat it exactly like what it is: one leaker's claim on one podcast episode, nothing confirmed.

The same episode ties that handheld talk to an AMD chip leak the hosts call "Gainsborough," floated as a possible piece of silicon behind next-generation portable hardware. Again, this is a chip name surfacing on a leak show, not a spec sheet from AMD or Sony. The hosts also walked through performance comparisons between an unreleased RDNA 5 graphics architecture and AMD's existing RX 7900 XTX, the kind of early benchmark chatter that shows up a year or two before anything ships and just as often gets revised into nothing.

What makes the SD card claim worth a second look is the contrast it draws with Valve. The same Broken Silicon episode breaks down expected performance for a Steam Deck 2, and Valve's existing Deck already takes microSD cards without drama. If Sony really is moving to the same open standard on a PS6 portable, that would be Sony admitting the walled-off memory card experiment on current PlayStation hardware was a hassle nobody asked for. Handheld owners have spent years paying a premium for cards that only work in one machine; a generic SD slot means the card from your camera or your Steam Deck works in your PlayStation too, and you're not locked into one manufacturer's checkout page when it's time to add storage.

None of this is official. No PlayStation blog post, no hardware reveal, nothing beyond a leak show connecting a storage rumor to a chip codename and a round of GPU benchmarks that haven't shipped yet. Leak shows have gotten things right before and flat wrong plenty of other times, and "Gainsborough" could end up meaning nothing by the time any of this hardware actually exists.

An SD card slot is a genuinely nice thing to hear a rumor about. It is also not a hardware reveal, a release window, or a price, and until Sony puts its name on one of those three, this is a podcast segment, not a product.