Sony has officially started the transition from the PlayStation 3 era with tonight's announcement of the PlayStation 4 at a press event in New York City.
"Today marks a moment of truth and a bold step forward for Sony as a company," Sony Computer Entertainment President Andrew House said. "The living room is no longer the center of the PlayStation ecosystem; the player is."
"It's conceived as the most personal gaming experience available today... This is the foundation of our next generation platform, PlayStation 4," House said.
Crash Bandicoot creator Mark Cerny discussed how the PS4 was needed to advance from the PS3, which came out as the uses of living room consoles were in flux.
"The architecture we chose is like a PC in many ways, but supercharged for gaming," Cerny said. He confirmed that the system will have an x86 processor and a "highly enhanced PC GPU" that will have "remarkable long-term potential." The system will sport 8GB of high-speed unified memory and a hard drive for local storage.
That high-speed memory is actually GDDR5, which Sony says will offer 176GBps of bandwidth. The system will have eight CPU cores and a "state-of-the-art" GPU on a single die, offering 2 teraflops of performance, according to Cerny. To show off this processing power, Cerny showed a live demo of Epic's Unreal Engine 4 running on development hardware.
