Sony to Start Mass Production of PlayStation 4 in Q3 2013

[Mavrick]

Sony Corp. admits that it does not have a mass-production PlayStation 4 box that it can bring out to the public. Nonetheless, the company seems to be pretty open about its plans regarding the new system and its current state. While the price of the PS4 is something that has yet to be determined, some reports point to the company’s alleged plans to start mass production of the device in Q3 2013.

“We are certainly capable of showing playable game content, but we do not have a mass-production box that we can bring out and pull out. That is still in development in terms of final specs and design,” said Jack Tretton, the president and chief exec of Sony Computer Entertainment America, in an interview with AllThingsD web-site.

In the meantime, according to a Chinese-language Economic Daily News (EDN) report (which was partly translated by DigiTimes web-site), Taiwan-based supply chain participants for the PlayStation 4, plan to begin shipments in the second quarter of 2013, which means that actual assembly of the console may start in the third quarter, or even earlier, depending on availability of components.

According to the report, including power supply maker Delta Electronics, connector maker Cheng Uei Precision Industry (Foxlink), and thermal module maker Foxconn Technology, will ship PS4 components in Q2.

At present, it is unclear which contract manufacturer will assemble the PlayStation 4 game console. The PS3 is produced by Sony EMCS, Foxconn Technology Group (Hon Hai Precision Industries) and Pegatron.

Sony PlayStation 4 is based on a semi-custom AMD Fusion system-on-chip that integrates eight AMD x86 Jaguar cores, custom AMD Radeon HD core with unified array of 18 AMD GCN-like compute units (1152 stream processors which collectively generate 1.84TFLOPS of computer power that can freely be applied to graphics, simulation tasks, or some mixture of the two), various special-purpose hardware blocks as well as multi-channel GDDR5 memory controller.

The PS4 will come with 8GB of unified GDDR5 memory sub-system (with 176GB/s bandwidth) for both CPU and GPU as well as large-capacity hard disk drive. Sony PS4 will be equipped with Blu-ray disc drive capable of reading BDs at 6x and DVDs at 8x speeds, USB 3.0 connectivity in addition to a proprietary aux port, Gigabit Ethernet port, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 EDR wireless technology as well as HDMI, optical and analog outputs. The new system will also utilize new DualShock 4 game controller with integrated touchpad as well as better motion sensing thanks to new PS4 Eye tracking cameras.

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