A number of sources within the development community have confirmed that they are taking receipt of new PlayStation 4 development kits. While sources tell us that Sony is telling developers that the final version should arrive at some point in January.

According to what we are being told the new development kit which is housed in a typical PC chassis is based around AMD’s A10 APU series. The best description is perhaps that it is a combined CPU and GPU that combined together to make up what AMD calls an APU and the APU in the latest dev kit is a derivative of the A10 series APU by AMD.

While Sony still is not actually calling the development kit by the name of PlayStation 4, the company is still preferring to go with calling the machine Orbis for the time being. US developers were treated to disclosure meetings this week were developers were told of the projected abilities and goals for the upcoming hardware in a series of presentations by Sony.

What else we know so far is that the intention is to still have a Blu-ray optical drive with this generation of hardware and will likely feature a 256GB storage device as standard. (Not yet known if this will be a hard drive or SSD, but Sony is apparently leaning toward the SSD option.) The I/O will remain the same from the PS3 with WiFi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, and HDMI.

The goal Sony has for this generation of hardware is to build something that is affordable out of the gate with the features that make it the best yet. Current buzz is that Sony is at least planning right now to launch the new system right before E3 in its own event next year.