Sony Playstation 4 rumours surface

Not much is known about the successor to the Playstation 3 — even the name.

Rumour has it that select developers have been sent development kits to work on games for the upcoming machine, apparently codenamed “Orbis”, which Sony is confident will hit the shops before the Xbox’s successor next year.

Although the only thing there is to go on at the moment is speculation, which should always be taken with a hearty pinch of salt, not much love is being directed at Sony’s next console.

One of the more chilling rumours is that it will utilise system-wide protection against used games. This means that second-hand games would operate in a limited “trial” mode unless its new owner payed a fee to unlock the full game. That sounds like console manufacturer hari-kari to us.

It is also rumoured that the console will use an x64 CPU and a “Southern Islands” GPU provided by AMD. The same GPU can be found in AMD‘s Radeon HD 7970 PC graphics card, which was first available to buy from Amazon UK in early January.

By the time the PS4 is to be released next year, that chip’s going to have done the rounds for quite a while, so it will hardly be cutting-edge hardware, but we are still very much within the realms of speculation.

It’s unlikely that Sony will want to make any wrong moves from the off with its next outing after huge initial expenditures for the Playstation 3 lead to direct losses for years afterwards.