While the official reveal of Sony's next home console could still be months away, if not longer, Kotaku has today learned some important details concerning the PlayStation 3's successor.
For one, the console's name—or at least its codename/working title—is apparently Orbis. And it's being planned for release in time for the 2013 holiday season.
The details in this story come from a reliable source who is not authorized to talk publicly about next-gen hardware but has shared correct information with us before. What they're telling us in specifics matches much of what we've heard and reported in generalities in recent weeks.
CURRENT SPECS
Our main source supplied some basic specs for the console, but as the future is always in motion, bear in mind these could easily change between now and the Orbis' retail release. Still, if you'd like to know what developers are being told to plan for now, here you go.
AMD x64 CPU
AMD Southern Islands GPU
The former, that's largely something we've heard before, but the latter is interesting. That's the name given to many of AMD's 2012 roster of high-end PC cards. The PS4's GPU in particular, we're told, will be capable of displaying Orbis games at a resolution of up to 4096x2160, which is far in excess of the needs of most current HDTV sets. It'll also be capable of playing 3D games in 1080p (the PS3 could only safely manage 3D at 720p).
http://orbis.scedev.net/ is a website, things like http://orbis2.scedev.net/ aren't.
Read the full article here with more rumored specs.
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Also, a Gaffer mentioned this:
http://www.coquesdesign.com/#/commercial-illustration/4530317815
so this site says it has sketches of "new playstation orbis features"?
UPDATE: Orbis product images pulled from their site...hohoho
CAN'T WAIT!