This week saw the announcement of specs for two gaming consoles: the PlayStation 4 and the PlayStation 5. Unfortunately for Sony, the PlayStation 5 was the latter; while the PlayStation 5 will no doubt be a significant upgrade over the PlayStation 4, Sony seems to be focusing more on storage than GPUs for its next-generation gaming console.

This is certainly a gamble and it will be interesting to see what happens. On the other hand, we can compare the PS5's specs to the Xbox Series X and speculate on what an equivalent gaming PC might look like (we will have a separate article on this).

Here is a detailed breakdown of the PS5 from Sony's Mark Cerny:

As with the Xbox Series X, Sony has combined the Zen 2 CPU core with a GPU core based on the next-generation RDNA 2 graphics architecture to build a custom SoC AMD was hired. We have known about this for some time. However, we have now been able to obtain more detailed information.

The PS5 will have eight physical CPU cores and 16 threads. Sony did not elaborate on the speed, but stated that it will have a variable frequency of up to 3.5 GHz. For reference, the desktop Ryzen 7 3700X (8 cores, 16 threads) has a base clock of 3.6 GHz and a maximum boost clock of 4.4 GHz. So, on paper, the custom CPU inside the PS5 is a slower version of the 3700X. [Microsoft has revealed that the 8-core/16-thread CPU runs at 3.8 GHz and 3.66 GHz with simultaneous multi-threading.

The PS5's built-in GPU is also downgraded compared to the Xbox Series X. Sony revealed that it consists of 36 compute units with variable frequencies up to 2.23 GHz and has a graphics performance of 10.28 TFLOPs; the Xbox Series X has 52 GPUs clocked at 1.825 GHz and a performance of 12 TFLOPs.

If you are looking for a comparable PC graphics card, the PS5 GPU has the same number of CUs as the Radeon RX 5700, but with higher clock speeds, more TFLOPs, and benefits derived from AMD's next-generation RDNA 2 architecture. Hardware-based ray tracing is part of the package, but otherwise it falls a bit short.

While worthy of attention, the CPU and GPU are not exactly barnburners, especially for a system that has not been on the market for more than eight months and is expected to be around for several years. Of course, this is just a look at the numbers, and raw power rarely tells the whole story. For example, the PlayStation 3's Cell processor was more powerful than the Xbox360's PowerPC chip, but it was also notoriously very difficult to develop. This time, however, the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 are built on very similar technology, so the raw power should be more comparable.

However, the one thing that Sony has done very differently so far is the SSD.

This is where the PS5 has an advantage over the Xbox Series X and PCs in general, perhaps a big advantage. Sony has included a custom (read: proprietary) 825GB SSD in the PS5, using custom flash memory and a 12-channel interface. In a deep dive shared with Digital Foundry, Sony stated that 825GB is the optimal capacity for a 12-channel interface, "Why 825GB instead of a more common capacity like 1TB?

"We can look at available NAND flash components and build one with the best price-performance. If someone is building an M.2 drive, they probably don't have that freedom, and it would be hard to market without one of these standard sizes," said PS5 system architect Mark Cerny.

The result is a raw performance of 5.5 GB/s. Sony notes that the PS5 can load 2GB of data in 1/4 of a second and 16GB of data in just 2 seconds. In addition, the controller is linked to the CPU via a 4-lane PCI Express 4.0 bus.

In addition to raw numbers, developers will have access to six levels of priority, allowing them to prioritize more important data over less important data into the system. We don't know exactly how this will work, but it appears that load times will be greatly reduced and screen transitions will be greatly reduced, or at least that is the expectation. Sony cites as possibilities: one-second game loads with no loading screens, instant reloads after dying in a game, and "fast travel so fast it blinks."

Sony also employs a fancy hardware decompression scheme to further improve performance. As a result, the company sees its 5.5 GB/s bandwidth as closer to 8-9 GB/s.

Users have the option to expand their storage with NVMe SSDs, which are readily available on PCs. There is one problem, however: to take full advantage of the PS5's capabilities, users will need to invest in such a PCIe 4.0 model. Also, even the fastest drives may be at a disadvantage compared to internal storage because of the lack of custom bits that Sony has included in its proprietary storage, but it remains to be seen how that will play out.

That's our detailed overview of the PS5, which after the announcement of the Xbox Series X is not a little disappointing. That said, the PS5 could still surprise us, and we have no idea how much either console will cost.