Sony announced the imminent arrival of the PlayStation 4 yesterday. The CEO, Andrew House unveiled the logo and concept at a launch event with the promise that it would be arriving this year.

Mark Cerny, creator of Marble Madness said that the development of PS4 began 5 years ago and that they have been aiming to ensure that “nothing gets between the platform and the game”. The new console is reputed to have multitasking ability as well as ease of use.

PS4 runs on x86 architecture, a “highly enhanced” PC GPU (wish “almost 2 teraflops of performance”), and 8GB of GDDR5 memory. The PS4 can pause and resume mid-game on a system level, which allows players to multitask. A second chip is dedicated to managing uploads and downloads, so you can download games in the background while playing another game. The PS4 is heavy on social interactivity and sounds as though Sony is aiming to have a Pinterest like social aspect for friends to share screens and video, making it really personalized.

In addition to this, they are working on a game streaming service, “PlayStation Cloud” which will allow players to try any game instantly without having to download a file to do so. This service will have so much more functionality which will extend to Vita, and mobile devices as well. The service will roll out in phases so there is a whole lot more to look out for from Sony this year. Watch this space to keep up to date with the latest in gaming!