Hot Chips: Xbone Silicon (5b transistors, 363mm2, 8GB Flash, 1.31TFlops, 204GB/s peak BW)

[Pemalite]

Goatseye said:

So is it possible for internal teams to unlock more core(s) to favor gaming in case of a very ambitious project? Or the hardware architecture of both consoles are not that flexible?

Edit: How many GB of the 8 (RAM) is shared between OS and gaming? No speculation please.

At this stage "no" to the first question.
The real limiter shouldn't be the amount of cores anyway, it's the per-core performance, which is downright anemic.
The thing with CPU's is they are designed to be *very* good at serialised processing, whilst GPU's are great at parallel processing.

For example, the CPU would read a book, page by page untill it got to the very end, where-as a GPU would read every single Page at the same time.
Some tasks need to be read by the hardware page by page, having something that could read each page faster would be ideal. (And why it would be nice for Console manufacturers to take CPU performance seriously for once.)
It's actually very difficult to load balance serialised processing over multiple cores, because some things has to be processed at the right time.
This is why most games specifiy a "main" thread for all the important processing, then will give extra tasks to other cores like sound processing, what this means is one core is always going to have higher usage than others.

Of course, this time around however, the CPU will actually be processing less tasks than prior generations, things like Physics which benefits greatly from parallel processing will fly on the GPU for instance.

Over time however might be a differet story, this generation both Sony and Microsoft made their respective operating systems leaner and faster, so they might eventually free up a core for developers to use eventually, but I wouldn't hedge any bets on that.

As for the Ram, at this stage it's looking like 3.5Gb and 3Gb is reserved for the PS4 and Xbox One Operating Systems respectively, the rest is gaming, the PS4 however is "rumoured" to have 512Mb-1024Mb of that OS memory as something games might be able to use.
Keep in mind however, that when it comes to building a cconsole, you can always free up more memory for the OS's, but you can never take more later on in the generation.