French publication Gamekyo are reporting that Nintendo will be unlocking a second core for Nintendo 3DS developers to play around with. Apparently developers will soon be able to take advantage of 25% additional power that was previously reserved for the Nintendo 3DS operating system.

source

how much better do you think games will look with this extra power?

Wait, wait, does that mean we could theoretically boot straight into single player games without bothering with the OS?

Well Soleron will be happy.

(I will also be happy)

25% better?

this is good but you just wonder why this wasn't the case from the beginning- there have been so many changes from the launch

More power too often just means less content as they need to make everything look flashy. We don't need games to show off the "power" of a system. Every time a system tries that is when it starts to falter.

It's simple. Nintendo is confused.

these changes are for the better

This has nothing to do with Nintendo being confused. Giving developers more freedom is what they should have done before but they didn’t think they would need this and that’s why they will unlock it now.

Unless we get an actual break down of what additional resources developers will have access to its hard to say what the effect of this will be.

Are developers getting more RAM? More CPU cycles? How does the 2nd Core currently function? Etc.

Given the already short battery life, it's probably to save energy. The PSP came with a 333 MHz CPU, yet devs could only use 222 MHz for whole two years after the release. Sony allowed the full use of the CPU in 2007:

"The hardware was originally forced to run more slowly than it was capable of and most games ran at 222 MHz. However, with firmware update 3.50 on May 31, 2007, Sony removed this limit and allowed new games to run at a full 333 MHz."

From Wikipedia.

My guess is that they had a dual core CPU but kept one exclusively for the OS to stop any potential conflicts but the OS probably never used more than half the core's cycles. They have probably since managed to sandbox the OS so the spare CPU cycles can be used for games hence the 25% increase as the OS is still using half the core.

As for why not from the start who knows ...