“We don’t have to make all the investment in-house,” says Sony exec about PlayStation 4 hardware development.

Unlike the PlayStation 3, Sony is not planning lose a major amount of money from selling PlayStation 4 hardware, the first-party publisher has said.

Speaking to investors in an earnings call today, Sony chief financial officer Masaru Kato said “we are not planning a major loss to be incurred with the launch of PS4.”

The PlayStation 3′s unique and expensive components had to be mostly developed in-house by Sony. “We made a lot of in-house investments to develop the [PlayStation 3 Cell processor],” said Kato, adding that “development of the chip saw the silicon processing and all the facilities invested by us ourselves.”

Sony has never officially divulged how much money it loses on every PlayStation 3 sold, but numerous analysts have attempted to work out the deficit. The Wall Street Journal estimated in 2010 that Sony lost about $18 on each PlayStation 3 sold at the time.

With the PlayStation 4 launch later in 2013, however, Kato says “we have a team working on chip development, but we already have existing technology to incorporate, and also product investment and all facilities will now be invested by our partners.”

“We don’t have to make all the investment in-house,” concluded Kato.

The PlayStation 4 features an APU developed in conjunction with AMD, containing an 8-core 64-bit processor and a custom Radeon GPU. The next-generation console also features 8GB of GDDR5 RAM.

During the system’s unveiling in February, PlayStation 4 lead systems architect Mark Cerny also said the decision to use off-the-shelf computer parts would be more friendly to software developers than the PlayStation 3′s bespoke Cell processor.

Elsewhere in the call, Sony confirmed previous expectations to make an annual profit of ¥43 billion (approximately $435m/£239m).

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IGN is reporting that Sony’s next console will use AMD’s A8-3850 APU and an HD 7670 GPU.

Sony’s next-generation console, reportedly codenamed Orbis, is rumoured to have the same graphics processing power as the next Xbox.

Will the PS4 be graphically aligned to the next Xbox?

According to a report on IGN citing anonymous sources, the PlayStation 4 is rumoured to utilise custom chips based on AMD’s A8-3850 APU and the Radeon HD 7670 GPU.

The report states that the HD 7670, a DirectX 11-enabled card clocked to 1GHz with up to 1GB of dedicated VRAM, is a “re-branded” version of the HD 6670 with identical specifications that will work together with the APU (the A8-3850 has a quad-core 2.9GHz processor with an integrated graphics chip).

According to IGN, the HD 6670 is the same card that will reportedly be used in the next Xbox console; if true, this would mean that Sony’s next-gen console would be graphically identical to Microsoft’s next-gen effort.

Whether this will help cross-platform development remains to be seen; IGN’s sources say Sony will “custom tool” the chipsets mentioned above for the PS4 ahead of the console’s launch.

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