is the extra hot sauce already out, or do we have to wait for a firmware update?

Thanks for the info. It's always nice for somebody to explain it in Layman terms.

Can you go into detail of what will be the positive and negative affects of opening the 7th core to developers? What size of leap of quality can we expect to see in games?

Honestly speaking. We won't really notice that much. Technically speaking for a properly optimized game, having access to one more core than you used to have access to should yeild an almost 15-17% boost in performance.

But let's not forget, this is CPU based performance we are talking about. Which  means that the overall CPU tasks for a well optimized game will be completed about 15-17% faster than what was the case before. Which in turn means that CPU simulation if the scene is finsiehd sooner giving the GPU  more frame time to render what we see (about maybe 5ms for 30fps game and 2.5ms gain for 60fps game).

For devs, these minute gains mean the world. To us, usually just results in more stable frame rates. And that's  assuming the devs don't  just take that extra gain and use it to just add yet another post processing effect which will "now not fuck up the frame rate that much since we have more powah!!!". Which 9/10 times is exactly what they would do anyways. 

Actually it's optimized software. ^^

Thanks again

Yes. they did. And it is written on the main post indeed. But it isn't fully unlocked on Xbone. It's shared with the OS. As such the devs can't fully rely on it. Still I have read some devs used it for some parallel minor tasks, like audio or else, freing the main 6 cores from those tasks. Now the question is if the PS4 SDK reserves the 7th core only for gaming.

It is just a waste of resources to lock cores or memory away at all. Dynamic resource allocation with priority for the consoles internal operating and encryption systems would be much more efficient and unlock all 8 cores for gaming. Only a very small fraction of the locked away resources are really needed, the rest is just not used and wasted.

That was my understanding as well. Xbox1 7th core is not fully unlocked, and on top of that the OS can still claim some more back when running some functions.

I guess we won't know for sure until official statements are released, but if it's the entire core the PS4 will have a slight advantage, especially as developers would be able to plan to fully utilise the core with no worry that it could suddenly drop performance.

Looks like Sony is copying MS again. What's next, backwords compatibility to PS2? :)

This will help with all multiplats that come out in 12+ months and exclusives that come out 6+ months from now. It's not like developers are redesigning games for this.

So, will help eventually.

Because with PS4 Sony is continuing the same philosophy that was in force with its predecessors. It differs in detail, but overall it is the same intention. The idea is to prevent developers to be able to fully tap into the hardware from the very beginning, being in control of how much games will gradually improve over the consoles life cycle. However, with the PS4 devs have not that hard a time as with the PS3, which was plainly intentionally made hard to develop games for.