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Sony Unlocks PlayStation 4's Previously Reserved Seventh CPU Core For Devs (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: Toward the beginning of the year, it was revealed that Microsoft was going to "unlock" the seventh core on the Xbox One's processor, enabling developers to eke just a bit more performance out of the console and offer more flexibility at resource utilization. It appears that Microsoft's move would inevitably be followed by Sony, as reports are now coming in that this will be made available on the PlayStation 4 as well. This subtle change was highlighted in the latest changelog for the FMOD sound engine which is labeled as a "LowLevel API." While the unlocked core could take on FMOD duties if developers want it to, it's now not going to be tied to any single purpose. Developers could make use of this core, for example, to boost AI performance, or any other process that has a heavy computation requirement. It could also be used to simply help ease overall system load.
No, no and no.
The PS4 and Xbox One both have "8 core" AMD CPU's.
Previously only 6 cores for both systems were available to game developers.
They're not disabled. They were reserved exclusively for the OS. Now that's changing
They want to be able to stream and have gimmicky input controls - like kinect. Thus they have to reserve processing power, otherwise would run into the risk that if the game reserve it all, the streaming experience is lowered or even so crappy as to be useless. The same way kinect for example you would need to reserve some processing power (although I think in the mean time they changed it so that if the game is not kinect enabled, that processing power is free to be used). And then again there might be system part for which they need even more processing power like DRM management.
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"Wouldn't two more cores, or approximately 25% of the processor power of the system, be useful to gamers that want better gameplay?"
Yeah but it'd also mean no free resources to support things like a common interface for inviting friends to your game, or still chatting to friends playing different games and so forth.
It'd mean no resources to just hop out of the game to check a video on YouTube if you're stuck, or resources to record your gameplay and stream it without each and every game having to support these things themselves.
Fact is modern consoles have a baseline of functionality that is common between games - friends lists, chat, recording/streaming gameplay and so on and that needs dedicated resources.
All that's happened here is that they've realised they don't need quite as many resources as they originally thought they might to support this baseline functionality.
It benefits game developers and users too - developers don't have to implement this stuff themselves, and users don't have to put up with completely different implementations between every game they're in, so it's a good thing.