I've just seen Mark Cerny's breakdown of the PS5 and although it's how it looks on paper, it's not completely true and there is a bit more to it, the PS5's GPU has less Compute Unit's so It can run at higher clock speeds, the TFLOPS are lower but the actual game performance depends on whether the game want's to process faster or want a larger chunk of data each time it cycles.
I agree that the CPU in the XBox has the legs and I do like the fact that developers have to choose between SMT threading and higher clock speeds, I'd really like to know if they can do with a selection of cores or if they have to disable SMT for all 8.
When it comes to storage and expanding storage, I have some issues with both of them. First of all wether, it is 1TB of 825GB is arbitrary to me since neither one is going to be large enough anyway. I get why they aren’t bigger of course, high-speed SSD’s are very expensive the architecture in both systems has been designed specifically to work with them. A regular HDD or even a lower speed SSD simply would not cut it, especially for XBox Series X or PS5 games. So in terms of balancing cost and storage, the ~1TB is a compromise that I am prepared to accept.
The difference here is in expansion options and again, I have issues with both. The PS5 will allow you to use M.2 SSD’s but you can’t just use ANY M.2 SSD. It has to be a PCI 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD that runs at 5.5GHz or better that fits in the SSD tray in the console. Mark Cerny mentioned that there will be a certification process but not in time for the launch. This is potentially a big problem because some people will want to expand the storage right away and I think ALLOT of users are going to end up buying the wrong thing.
With that in mind, XBox would seem to have a better solution with the proprietary storage cards, but these have problems too. First of all they are almost certainly going to be VERY expensive. I actully think they will be more expensive than the equivalent M.2 SSD you could get for the PS5 and you will need to buy another 2 or 3 over the course of the generation. Also proprietary storage like this can be a real headache since it gives you less choice, just any anyone who has ever owned a VITA about the Memory Sticks!
Overall, I actully prefer the PS5 architexure because of the only differnce which I think is significant but a lot of people might not take much notice of:
XBox Series X
PS5
The PS5 will demand specifically a PCI 4.0 NVMe SSD for a reason! The XBox might have slightly more powerful components, but the silicone fabric linking them all together has only around half the bandwidth. This means that there is a significantly larger chance of bottlenecking between the CPU/GPU and the SSD storage, which means it's going to have to use more RAM to keep the data it needs closer to home and overall just be less efficient. Whether this makes any difference further down the line only time will tell but Sony has definitely designed the more robust architecture here.