We don’t know squat about what the PS4 will look like since it didn’t make an appearance at Sony’s two-hour long press event yesterday, but we’ve learned a lot about what it will be like when it finally shows up. And now we know it’s going to have AMD innards.
As expected, the PS4 will be running on an APU — a combo CPU and graphics processor rolled into one. And that APU, an AMD joint, is a mashup of an 8-core x86-64 AMD “Jaguar” and a 1.84 teraflop AMD Radeon-based graphics engine. Paired with the PS4’s 8GB of RAM, you can look forward to some pretty serious horsepower but the downside, of course, is that that x86 architecture is responsible for the lack of “native” backward compatibility for PS3 games.
The APU is described as “semi-custom”, so it may not be entirely exclusive to the PS4. We’ll have to wait and see what the next Xbox is reppin’. But in the meantime it looks like the PS4 has taken some pretty good first shots in this new theatre of console war. Now let’s just see that box.