Sony has discreetly raised developer’s abilities to use the power of the PlayStation 4, by unlocking its 7th CPU core.
First, an explanation of what this means. Both the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One use their seventh cores for some operating system functions, and to help run games. The manufacturers kept these cores locked for a reason; namely, to ensure the consoles work correctly.
At this point, however, developers have worked on games for both consoles long enough that they are intimately familiar with the hardware already. On top of this, Microsoft felt the pressure to unlock their CPU core first, as early as January of this year. Thanks to this and some overclocking, the Xbox One is actually capable of outperforming the PlayStation 4.
And so, developers discovered with the recent SDK update that Sony has unlocked PlayStation 4’s CPU core as well. As a general rule, Sony prefers to keep these details quiet, but of course, this could translate to substantial improvements in performance for future (and even some current) PlayStation 4 games, such as Uncharted 4 and Horizon Zero Dawn.
So, it seems fair to assume Sony’s first party studios got dibs on this tech. Do you think we’ll be seeing the difference as early as 2016? Share your thoughts with us in the comments.
Cover image is from Horizon Zero Dawn.