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Both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 recently passed their two-year lifespan. As such, developers are still finding out how far they can push their games on both consoles based on the CPU power available. Recently, a patch from Firelight Technologies, a game audio company, revealed that the seventh core on the PlayStation 4’s CPU would be unlocked for developers.
Obviously, this means more power, as it now gives creators a total of five cores to allocate to their games (two cores are initially reserved for the operating system). The PS4 is powered by an eight-core, x86-64 AMD chip (1.6 GHz) based on the Jaguar microarchitecture. It’s not clear as to how much of a performance boost is available with the new core, but developers could add the extra processing power to a current title with a patch. Nevertheless, we should be seeing the results of the additional core with games scheduled for release in 2016.
Unlike the PlayStation 4, the Xbox One has been utilizing seven cores for quite some time; according to leaked data from the hacking group H4LT (the tweet has since been deleted), game developers on the Xbox One have had access to the CPU’s seventh core since November 2014. Microsoft’s console uses the same AMD chip as the PlayStation 4, but at a faster clock speed of 1.75 GHz.