PlayStation 4 Revealed

Goodbye, Orbis. Hello, next-gen.

After weeks of speculation, Sony officially unveiled its next console from a live event in NewYorktoday: the PlayStation 4. The console will be released this holiday season.

Sony's Andrew House said the new console will create "experiences that surpass gamers' wildest expectations."

Lead system architect on the PlayStation 4, Mark Cerny, said "the development of a next-gen platform started about five years ago" and that it's goal is "freeing developers from technological barriers." Cerny has a history in the video game industry dating back more than 30 years, first with Atari and later companies like Sega of Japan and Universal Interactive Studios.

Cerny said the platform is "by game creators for game creators" and that its architecture is "like a PC, but supercharged." PS4 uses the X86 CPU and has 8GB of memory and a local hard drive. It uses APU technology and GDDR5 memory, which is typically reserved for "top of the line, high end graphics cards."

The pillars of PS4 are Simple, Immediate, Social, Integrated and Personalized. PlayStation 4 supports suspending and reloading play sessions. The console has a secondary chip for uploading and downloading in the background. Digital games can be played as they are being downloaded.

The system supports seamless uploads of gameplay, spectating friends' gameplay sessions in real time as well as integrated chat. Players will have profile pages like Facebook integrated to the "full PlayStation ecosystem."