PS4 is short for "Play Station 4" – the Sony's next generation game console. PS4 has great game graphic and the new cloud technology with which you can implement online game streaming and wireless control. PS4 was first released in US and Canada only on November 18th 2013 and it will release in other countries in the next 2 months. For people who haven't got PS4 yet, they are very eager to know something about this new game console like what hardware configuration PS4 has, what's the price, does it support old PS3 game, etc. And in this article, you'll get the answers of these questions.

Hardware configuration of PS4

PS4 equips brand new chipset and controller. Here are the details.

CPU	Architecture: AMD Jaguar X86-64
	Cores/Threads: 8/8
	Frequency: 1.6-2.75 GHz
	Shared L2 Cache: 2*2 MB
GPU	Architecture: AMD next-generation Radeon based graphics engine
	Peak Shader Throughout: 69.240 TFLOPS
	Cores: 1152
	Clock: 800 MHz
Memory & Storage	Memory: 8GB GDDR5
	Frequency: 5500 MHz
	System Memory Bandwidth: 176.0 GB/s
	Storage size: 500GB hard disk drive, user removable
Others	BD/DVD drive: BD x 6 CAV, DVD x 8 CAV, Blu-ray and DVD playback, no audio CD support (read only)
	Input/Output: USB 3.0 port x2, AUX port x1
	Networking: Ethernet x1, IEEE 802.11b/g/n (2.4 GHz only), Bluetooth 2.1+EDR
	AV output: HDMI out port, digital out optical port. SD output is supported for lower-resolution displays. HD output at 720p, 1080p and 1080i.
Dualshock 4 Controller	Size: 162mm*52mm*98mm
	Weight: 210g
	Buttons: PS, SHARE, OPTIONS, direction keys, action keys (?×??), L1/R1/L2/R2, L3/R3 analog sticks, touch pad
	Touch pad: clickable 2-point touch pad with 1920*900 resolution
	Others: Light bar, built-in microphone

Can you play PS3 games on PS4

It seems like to be a tradition that new game consoles always don't have backward compatibility. You can't run Xbox 360 games on the latest Xbox One, and unfortunately, the same situation happens to PS4 – all the games for old PS game consoles like PS One, PS2 and PS3, are all incompatible on the new PS4. If you insert a PS3 game disk into the PS4, you only get this result.

Why these game consoles can't run the old game? There are many reasons for this question. Some are the technical and some are commercial.

1. Technical reason

Each generation of game console has different hardware architecture and the games are optimized for the specific hardware (This is one of the reasons why game console always have better game graphics than PC). An extra chipset may be needed to simulate the old game for new game consoles. This will increase cost beyond doubt.

2. Commercial reason

New game consoles always hasten new games. If the new game consoles can run old games, they players may not have much enthusiasm to buy the new games. The backward incompatibility can make users pay more attention to the new games.

How to play PS3 games on PS4

So is it totally impossible to play PS3 games on PS4? You may think I'm joking as I've said that PS4 don't support PS3 games in the above. But the truth is that we can play PS3 games on PS4indeed with the cloud platform – Gaikai. This is a method with which we can run PS3 games on the server, not PS4 itself. PS4 is only the display device. All the operations and computing in the game are accomplished by the cloud platform. But not all PS3 games can run on the Gaikai cloud platform and the network delay is may be a serious problem. Sony hasn't announced the detailed information of this cloud stream plan. It's said the Gaikai service will first start in US in 2014. So all we need to do is just waiting.