Sony’s next gaming platform codenamed “Orbis” and running on AMD CPU/GPU

According to various reports around the web, Sony’s next console, the Playstation 4, is currently codenamed Orbis.

Starting from the name, according to Kotaku, this name comes from Latin, meaning circle or orbit, and when joining Orbis with Vita you get “the circle of life”. Whatever this all means is unknown, could the Vita have connections to the Playstation 4?

Getting onto the specifications of things, reports indicate that the current basic specs of the Playstation 4 will be of an AMD CPU (x86-x64) and GPU (Southern Islands). Now even though things are narrowed down, it still leaves quite a lot of possibilities on what will come out. We certainly know the the GPU will be of the latest 28nm technology, although the information on the CPU are very little, therefore it’s hard to guess what it will be.

As for the other features, while we’ve heard about the possibility of the Xbox not reading used games, well it turns out that the Playstation may be on the same way, yet going even higher. Not only will the next Playstation not read used games, it will also ask for new games to be authenticated via the PSN. As for the Playstation 3 games, if you’re going to sell your console, you might as well sell the games with it as the Playstation 4 won’t even bother offering backwards compatibility.

Obviously this has to be taken with a grain of salt, the launch of the console itself is still far away (or is it?), so even though these come from a reliable source, or a rather unclear source, there is no certainty. Either way, things seem to be going well on one side, while the other looks rather disappointing. We shall see what the future holds.

Source: Kotaku