Opinion: Sony's PlayStation 4 is a thinly disguised PC

Sony may not have had an actual box to display. But it has revealed the innards of its next-gen PlayStation 4 games console. And it's pure PC.The CPU is an AMD design with eight x86-64, low-power Jaguar cores, while the graphics core is also from AMD and derived from its latest Radeon HD family and roughly equivalent to a 7850 graphics board. But does that matter? Possibly. Here's why.In really simple terms (and this assumes leaked info on the next console from Microsoft turns out to be correct), games development just got a whole lot easier.From now on, you'll develop on one platform â€" the PC â€" and simply recompile for PlayStation or Xbox. OK, it'll be a bit more complicated than that in practice. But the basic notion is correct.And it puts the PC into an interesting position in the gaming hierarchy. Lowest common denominator The feeble specs of existing games consoles is easily the biggest drag on game development. CPU and GPU specs grab the headlines and both the PS3 and the Xbox 360 are looking horribly outdated by both metrics.But more than anything it's memory space and bandwidth that's the biggest bummer. Current consoles don't have nearly enough of either and it makes life very hard for developers attempting to realise large, realistic game worlds.The good news is that the new PS4 is a massive step forward. It packs 8GB of super fast GDDR5 memory and 176GB/s of raw memory bandwidth.But the really interesting bit involves the fact that the CPU and GPU are squeezed