Late last week, Kotaku revealed information from an unnamed source about some new hardware from Sony. Codenamed “Orbis”, the hardware has an AMD x64 CPU and an AMD Southern Islands GPU making it roughly as powerful as some of the high end gaming PCs due out this year.
Some of this is backed up by the SCE subdomain orbis.scedev.net working. This is the portal that developers use to access resources for development. vita.scedev.net and ngp.scedev.net both work, as does the PS3 equivalent.
Orbis will be out next year, expected sometime before Christmas 2013. Of course, it may not be a worldwide release, as what happened with the PlayStation 3 back in 2006. It it also rumoured that the new console won’t be backward compatible with PS3 games, which is somewhat disappointing.
Kotaku goes on to mention a new restrictive DRM system, which required you to lock a newly purchased game (Blu-ray) to your PSN account, which will allow you to copy the whole thing to your hard disk but will also render trade-ins useless. Basically, anyone purchasing a used game will have to pay a fee to unlock the full version, similar to the current PSN Pass required to play new games online.
As usual, we’ve filed this under the ‘rumor’ category until Sony make an official announcement…
The word “Orbis” itself, from Latin, means circle, or ring, or even orbit. Combine the name with the recently launched PlayStation Vita, and you have the common term Orbis Vita (or, in strict Latin, Orbis Vitae), which means “The circle of life”. Something to think about while we wait for Sony to announce a new console…