On March 18, 2020, Sony held a livestream to introduce specifications of its upcoming PlayStation 5. Over the course of an hour, PlayStation 5 lead system architect Mark Cerny detailed what developers and players can expect from the system. While much of the information is jargon for developers, shown side by side with the specifications of Microsoft's Xbox Series X the power of each system comes into focus.

The Xbox Series X outdoes the PlayStation 5 in nearly every category but industry experts agree that the relative difference in reality will be much less pronounced than the comparison suggests. Analysts also expect the Xbox Series X to cost significantly more than the PlayStation 5 due to its hardware. Both consoles are expected to release around the Holiday 2020 season.

Find a complete comparison below and take a deeper dive into the PlayStation 5 here and the Xbox Series X here.

CPU

PlayStation 5: 8x Zen 2 Cores at 3.5GHz (variable frequency)

Xbox Series X: 8x Cores at 3.8GHz (3.6GHz with SMT) Custom Zen 2 CPU

GPU

PlayStation 5: 10.28 TFLOPS, 36 CUs at 2.23GHz (variable frequency)

Xbox Series X: 12 TFLOPS, 52 CUs at 1.825GHz Custom RDNA 2 GPU

Memory

PlayStation 5: 16GB GDDR6/256-bit

Xbox Series X: 16GB GDDR6/256-bit with 320 bus

Memory Bandwidth

PlayStation 5: 448GB/s

Xbox Series X: 10GB at 560GB/s, 6GB at 336GB/s

Internal Storage

PlayStation 5: Custom 825GB SSD

Xbox Series X: 1TB Custom NVME SSD

I/O Throughput

PlayStation 5: 5.5GB/s (Raw), Typical 8-9GB/s (Compressed)

Xbox Series X: 2.4GB/s (Raw), 4.8GB/s (Compressed with custom hardware decompression block)

Expandable Storage

PlayStation 5: NVMe SSD Slot

Xbox Series X: 1 TB expansion card

External Storage

PlayStation 5: USB HDD Support

Xbox Series X: USB 3.2 External HDD Support

Optical Drive

PlayStation 5: 4K UHD Blu-Ray Drive

Xbox Series X: 4K UHD Blu-Ray Drive