Operating systems are love / hate things. We want them to look nice, we want them to respond quickly, and we want them to be fully featured; at the same time, we don’t want them to take up a lot of resources. Up to this point, two out of the eight cores in the PS4 CPU were reserved for background operations and for the OS. The same could be said on the Xbox One until Microsoft decided to make some GPU modifications and unlock the seventh core of its CPU in an attempt to close the performance gap between the Xbone and PS4. Now, about a year later, Sony is following suit.
This isn’t going to offer a huge increase in power, and that seventh core will likely still be partially utilized for the PS4 OS, but more power is always a good thing. For future releases, this extra juice will likely offer just the resources needed to secure consistent frame rates when the on-screen action heats up. There have also been whispers regarding PS2 emulation and whether or not the CPU was being freed up to aid in that regard. We probably won’t hear about this again unless it’s specifically mentioned in a future developer diary or outlined in a patch for a game we’re playing already; Sony made this move quietly, like a benevolent, promethean ninja.
Source: NeoGaf