Sony has launched its next-generation game console in India, the PlayStation 4, which it has priced at Rs. 39,990. The PS4 will be available on shelves in the country starting 6 January 2014.
Additional controller and the PlayStation Camera have been priced at an identical Rs 4,990. First-party gaming titles have been priced at Rs. 3,999 while third-party titles will range between Rs. 2,499 and Rs. 4,499.
Notably, the PlayStation 4 was launched in the US on November 15. Earlier this month, Sony revealed it had sold more than 2.1 million PlayStation 4 consoles after less than three weeks on the market. This follows Sony’s statistic that it had sold 1 million consoles on launch day.
The latest PlayStation will be released in its home market Japan in February. Sony also announced that looking at the current PlayStation 4 sales figures, it was on track to hit its worldwide target of 5 million units by March 2014.
The Sony PS4 is powered by an integrated CPU-GPU design, featuring a 8-core low power x86-64 AMD “Jaguar” CPU, coupled with a 1.84 TFLOPS AMD Radeon GPU. It also features a secondary processor that does the network processing tasks in standby mode, in order to optimise power consumption.
The PS4 features 8GB of GDDR5 RAM for memory, coupled with a 500GB hard disk drive. Also onboard is a Blu-ray disc and DVD drive. Connectivity options include 2 USB 3.0 ports, one AUX port, an Ethernet port, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1 (EDR), an HDMI out port, and an optical-out port.
Interestingly, both Microsoft and Sony have opted for an x86-based CPU-GPU SoC architecture for their consoles, powered by AMD. This also signals a convergence of game development and releases for the console and PC platforms, making it easier for developers to harness the potential of the hardware across platforms.
Microsoft’s next-generation console, the Xbox One (Review), is the only real competition for the Sony PS4, especially in India, where the Nintendo Wii U has yet to make an appearance. For now, Microsoft only gave a tentative launch date for the Xbox One in India during the E3 2013 event, saying it would arrive by late 2014. Since then of course, reports have indicated a slightly earlier launch, by mid-2014.
Source-NDTV
