So, uh, about that "Sony Dev React" thing that is still going after 26 pages. From what I've gathered on this thread :
Kurt Margeneau (Naughty Dog) ---> Sony dev
Anthony Newman (Naughty Dog) --> Sony dev
James Cooper (no studio currently) --> Not Sony dev anymore
Andrew Maximov (Promethean AI) --> Not Sony dev anymore
Randy Pitchford (Gearbox) --> Not Sony dev
Matt Philips (Big Evil Corp) --> Not Sony dev
Mike Evans (ex AMD) --> Not Sony dev
Robert Boyd (Zeboyd Games) --> Not Sony dev
Andrea Pessino (Ready at Dawn) --> Not Sony dev
Dale North (composer) --> Not Sony dev
Olivier JT (VR audio) --> Not Sony dev
Jason Nuyens (Breakfall) --> Not Sony dev
It's great to see developers being excited about PS5 and next gen in general.
Looking forward to the games speaking for themselves.
If multiplats are going to be near identical, then why did Sony bother customizing the SSD to such as extent?
Why not put all those resources into improving the rest of the hardware (GPU/CPU/RAM)?
Did they not have 3P developers in mind, rather than just their own 1P studios? WWS are the only ones I can see even using the SSD to its fullest potential.
Mutiplats are going to be near identical since the two consoles are almost identical numbers at hand.
They are based on the same architecture with the same efficiencies, the CPUs have meaningless differences (pretty much zero difference in multithreading), RAM capacity is the same, two pools with different speeds on Xbox, one single pool closer to the Xbox fastest one in PS5. Xbox has an edge in bandwidth only if they always stay into the 10GB pool otherwise datas will be bottlenecked by the lower speed pool.
GPU is 15-20% better on Xbox in floating point computations.
Don't really know what kind of differences people are expecting. This is a clearly smaller gap than the PS4 vs Xbox One difference and it's basically going to translate into a resolution difference that is perceptually irrelevant like 1800p vs 4k in ray traced games or same res with more stable frame rate on Xbox.
PS5 is going to have a significant edge in loading times and assets loading (high quality textures streaming, high LOD models and such) and in first party games designed around this (not to mention that Sony won't have to bother supporting old platforms with their PS5 games).
About your question on why they did this, I think that first of all we don't have the full picture and that means what kind of price they had in mind when they designed this system and we'll only find out when they announce the price.
What if it's 399$? That would put things in a whole different perspective, it would be almost miracle like that they got these specs at that price. We don't know though, the message is not complete and Sony has done a terrible work with the marketing.
Second Cerny explained his design philosophy pretty well: he believes that SSD is the game changer in this gen since it can change the way games are designed, he also put a lot of importance on audio with the tempest engine and a lot of importance in sensory feedback in the controller, so it's clear the system was designed taking into account much more than graphics alone. He also believes that certain performance figures don't tell the whole story or can be misleading.
Games will tell who's right.
Seriously I wouldn't even discuss about the specs, the only problem Sony has to fix right now is their marketing, show amazing games and sell the system at a competitive price.