With Sony's reveal of the hardware specifications and architecture it's easy to say at a glance, "the specs are lower than the Xbox Series X," and call it at that. Though things are not as simple as they seem. At it's core the Xbox is still basically setup like a PC, but with many things directly attached for faster speeds all around. Though the bottleneck you run into is pushing all of your data through the processor I/O controller before it even hits the RAM, GPU, or anything else it needs to. I had a hard time acquiring any AMD processor technical datasheets so here is one of an Intel i9. The construction of the chips and controllers only vary slightly in terms of actual layout.

So as seen here you can see that for a typical PC processor, all the data needs to be routed through one of the system controller chips to get where it needs to go. When trying to process large volumes of data for a game, this creates a bottle neck. Like trying to push too much water through a hose eventually it will back up and cause problems. In the case of a game you have to scale back assets and features until you meat the I/O Controller's bandwidth requirements. Now on to the way the PS5's SoC(System on a Chip) is setup.

In the case of the PS5 there are custom I/O controllers for each place you need to send data. This basically gives you an independent channel of bandwidth for each specific task meaning a programmer can push large amounts of data through to each area simultaneously. This is what will allow developers to eliminate load times, hitching between game sections, etc. Basically instead of one hose to push your water through you now have six hoses, and obviously that equates to a lot more water going where you want. I don't have the details of the Xbox Series X SoC, but considering they mentioned wanting to run more generalized applications and the possibility of installing Windows 10 it seems unlikely Microsoft would take this approach due to the way Memory Access works within the Windows system. If I am correct this means that though the specifications of the PS5 are slightly less, it could still potentially out-perform the Xbox Series X through sheer throughput. Take this all with a grain of salt though, this does not necessarily mean all games will utilize the technology and be able to achieve the same performance as Sony first-party studios. Not every studio has the time, or the budget to invest in the R&D necessary to fully utilize the technology. In the case of Xbox you are basically programming like you would for a Windows 10 PC which is far easier for sure. I guess everyone will eventually see how this plays out though, but PS5 from a hardware and programming perspective is certainly very tantalizing. That is my two-cents on the subject, have a good day everyone!