However, in November 2012, strong rumours have suggested that PS4 dev kits have been issued to developers packing an AMD A10 APU (check out our review of this combo chip here), between 8GB and 16GB of RAM, 256GB of storage and a Blu-ray drive.
The graphics part of the A10 APU is already quite dated, which is a big disappointment but not all that surprising.
Those chips aren't even the best that AMD currently has to offer - so by the time the PS4 goes on sale it would be woefully lacking in power compared to the latest AMD tech, let alone the most advanced chips from Nvidia and Intel.
So it's for this reason that we suspect - or hope - that current PS4 development kits may currently be using these AMD chips, but the final PS4 will most likely pack something a little more special. We would at least expect aSteamroller APU packing a newer graphics core.By 2014, Intel will be shipping 14nm - or possibly even tooling up for 11nm - CPUs and with that amount of transistors on a die, we're talking serious performance and efficiency gains.
Now, because a console is a closed platform, it's possible for developers and engineers to squeeze more performance out of any given chip than would be possible in a PC which has a lot more redundancies to cater for.
So the PS4 will have decent graphics no matter what. But this is still very much last-generation tech we're talking here.
And according to various rumours, Sony is attempting to get 4K gaming out the door with the PS4, along with full HD 1080p 3D gaming for the first time.
We don't think it would even be possible to achieve this kind of output with the A10 APU unless some kind of multi-GPU set-up is being used - so it's highly likely that Sony will pair the eventual APU with a low-end discrete graphics card to help things along.
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