Rumors rumors everywhere, and not an ounce of confirmation from Sony! Oh Sony, what’s going on with your PlayStation 4? The truth is that we really don’t know, other than we’re fairly sure that it will not be making an appearance any time soon. At least, that’s if you believe what you read on the internet. If you’re reading this, then that’s a possibility.
We’ve been hearing a variety of rumors of late, with both Sony’s PlayStation 4 ‘Orbis’ and Microsoft’s next Xbox both finding themselves on the end of distinctly Apple-like speculation. Which will arrive first? Which will be the most powerful? We really don’t know either of those, but what we do know is there is a good chance at least one will house enough anti-piracy measures to sink a battleship.
New rumors out of Kotaku, and now almost-confirmed by IGN, suggest that the next machine to sport the famous PlayStation branding will feature some very real hardware. By ‘very real’ we actually mean very current. See, the rumor-mill claims that the next PlayStation will actually feature two current pieces of technology rather than some new, all singing, all dancing technology that we’ve never heard of.
The current gist is that the PS4 will be powered by an AMD A8 processor, and sport a Radeon HD 7670 Graphics chip to push those pixels around your big screen TV. Both of those two chips are available in PCs that are shipping today, which may be surprising to some and, we suspect, rather disappointing.
IGN believes that the A8’s on-board graphics core will be disabled, with two graphics chips taking over the responsibility of powering the new machine. The bonus here is that the A8 will obviously run a tad cooler if it has some of its internals switched off, and those two discrete graphics chips should sport some power, too.
Sony’s choice of standard components may be related to the decision to use fancy Cell processors in the PS3. The machine famously cost a lot to build and, as a result, wasn’t cheap to buy. Throw in difficulty making the things and Sony ended up with an egg on its face. Some argue that Cell CPU is the main reason Sony is still lagging in the home console race.
Someone at Sony seems to have learned their lesson.
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