Sony Computer Entertainment said this week that it would ship the PlayStation 4 video game console this calendar year. The only thing that Sony did not reveal is where exactly it plans to sell its next-generation game console in 2013. For example, if the company keeps the roll-out strategy of PlayStation Vita, the PS4 may only become available in Japan this year.

Starting from the PlayStation 2, Sony tried to make its best to roll-out its home game consoles in Japan and the U.S. the calendar year they were announced and followed in PAL regions a little later. The company was also supposed to launch its portable PlayStation Vita in calendar 2011 in both Japan and the U.S., however, that year Sony only unleashed the PS Vita in Japan and delayed the roll-out in North America and Europe to February, 2012. Based on the comments that Sony has made so far, it is completely unclear where exactly the PlayStation 4 is set to become available this calendar year.

“We are not saying if ‘Holiday 2013’ includes Europe at this stage. We are only saying we will launch the system before the end of 2013, we are not saying in which parts of the world. But do not infer anything good or bad from that,” said Jim Ryan, president and chief executive officer of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, in an interview with MCV UK web-site.

At the event when Sony first announced the PlayStation 4 and revealed its capabilities, the company did not show the actual console itself, therefore it is possible that the design of the system has not been finalized at this stage. Until Sony finalizes the console, it cannot order mass production and possible cannot make strong commitments to volumes. Therefore, it is highly likely that at this point the company does not have exact launch plan of the console as well as its launch prices.

The highly-integrated Sony PlayStation 4 system-on-chip 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.

Tags: Sony, Playstation, Orbis, AMD, Jaguar, Radeon, ATI, 28nm