PlayStation 4's Seventh Core Now Unlocked For Developers

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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.

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Rexly Peñaflorida II is a Contributor at Tom’s Hardware. He writes news on tech and hardware, but mostly focuses on gaming news. As a Chicagoan, he believes that deep dish pizza is real pizza and ketchup should never be on hot dogs. Ever. Also, Portillo’s is amazing.

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Rexly Peñaflorida
27 Comments Comment from the forums
  • captaincharisma
    now maybe square will not have any more problems getting 60FPS out of the upcoming final fantasy game
    Reply
  • hst101rox
    5 cores for the developers, 7 cores available for everything for both PS4 and Xbox1? Why not all 8 cores?

    Sony is just now allowing 5 cores to be used by developers? What is the point in not allowing it, if the rest of the system can run fine on the remaining cores?
    Reply
  • jimmysmitty
    17041965 said:
    5 cores for the developers, 7 cores available for everything for both PS4 and Xbox1? Why not all 8 cores?

    Sony is just now allowing 5 cores to be used by developers? What is the point in not allowing it, if the rest of the system can run fine on the remaining cores?

    Sony probably was allocating cores to specific tasks to make sure there was no lag or issues going from game to "desktop" etc. It is much like a PC. Most games that can use more than one core allocate certain aspects to other cores, such as Crysis that needed a dual core since it used the second core to process audio.

    I don;t think there is going to be a massive boost in games TBH. Even with the more direct coding that consoles get, CPU cores only allow for so much performance. More SPUs would benefit games vastly more.
    Reply
  • dstarr3
    Already maxing out the hardware two years into its lifespan? I suspect this generation of consoles will not be able to last the seven years the last one somehow did.
    Reply
  • lorfa
    now maybe square will not have any more problems getting 60FPS out of the upcoming final fantasy game

    Not Square, Square Enix! My beloved Square is long gone, their last title was FFX :-/
    Reply
  • firefoxx04
    Saying that both systems have "the same cpu" is pretty misleading. While they are "the same" they do have some differences that gives one of them an advantage over the other (i cant remember what has what). They should hardly be considered "the same".

    That being said, its pathetic that they require all these cores to run a game at mediocre settings. Developers cant simply start writing games to take advantage of more cores. They can offload things to new cores here or there but its not as simple as utilizing all cores right away.
    Reply
  • Johan Kryger Haglert
    Already maxing out the hardware two years into its lifespan? I suspect this generation of consoles will not be able to last the seven years the last one somehow did.
    It doesn't have to.
    It's more or less generic PC-hardware and can rather easily be upgraded.
    Reply
  • belardo
    With both consoles using very PC-type parts and a good "OS" installed. They should easily make new consoles in about 2 years (max) as the hardware today CANNOT handle 4K TVs. 4K TVs are quickly hitting the $600 price range and the PS4 isn't even close to handling it. The GPUs on the market are in the $200+ range to handle 4K as well.

    So, they can come out with the PS5, use the exact SAME OS so it'll be PS4 compatible and play PS5 games in 4K mode. Then sell the PS4 for about $200 for the low-range market.

    At this point, consoles cannot survive on a 6~8 year life-span. It should be 4 years now... and with using PC parts and standardized OS - WHY bother re-writing the OS and hardware from the ground up? It adds un-necessary costs and time that is not warrented. The developers would be happy to have the PS4 compatibility - especially for 1080 users. This would give the PS5 a huge library with a year or so for SONY to phase out the PS4.
    Reply
  • Bloob
    Already maxing out the hardware two years into its lifespan? I suspect this generation of consoles will not be able to last the seven years the last one somehow did.
    It doesn't have to.
    It's more or less generic PC-hardware and can rather easily be upgraded.

    Last gen was an exception anyway, usual console cycle is 4-6 years (although I wouldn't be surprised to see that get extended as games get more complex to make).
    Reply
  • fuzzion
    As a member of the PC MASTER RACE i had a laugh hahha :D
    Reply