During the Playstation 4 reveal event on Wednesday, Sony showed us a lot of things. They didn't show the console but they did reveal the Playstation 4 controller, some specs, games but mostly showed us how the Playstation 4 is a social butterfly; connected to everything. However, what really matters are the specifications of the Playstation 4.
The Playstation 4's CPU is an 8 AMD x86-64 Jaguar cores with an integrated graphics APU. The CPU can probably be clocked at 2 GhHz. The PS4's has a Radeon GPU with a unified array of 18 compute units that is capable of generating 1.84 teraflops of power. That power can be applied to simulation or graphics or both. The architecture of the APU is built to really allow the developers to take advantage of parallel processing. This is a drastic change from their overly complex Playstation 3 architecture with Gran Turismo's head calling it a "blank canvas."
Sony showcased the power by showing us a demo of the Havok engine, which is a physics simulation engine. They dropped 1 million tiny little blue balls all at once, the simulation was all run by the GPU. Also, a secondary custom chip will take care of uploads and downloads will be available. This will make the one feature I was most excited to hear about possible, the ability to play a game while it downloads.
This is what throws the Playstation 4 up to the high ranks of some of the best gaming PCs out there. The Playstation 4 will come with 8GB of unified GDDR5 system memory. This will be used for both the CPU and GPU. The bandwidth will be 176GB per second, which is ridiculously impressive. The Playstation 4 will have a built in hard drive but Sony gave no details about just yet.
The Playstation 4 will have a 3.0 USB with "super speed", ethernet port, 802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth, HDMI, Optical in and out and an analogue AV. There is an AUX port too but it wasn't really made clear. We'll be sure to keep you updated. Don't forget to check out our look at the Playstation 4 controller.