Sony's made your PlayStation 4 that little bit more powerful without telling you. Well, that's the conclusion that NeoGAF has come to – and for good reason. Since launch, the Japanese giant has restricted game development to just six of the system's eight CPU cores. The remaining two were reserved for operating system operations.

However, it sounds like the platform holder's unlocked a seventh CPU core for developers to use. The information comes courtesy of a changelog for the FMOD audio middleware. In the documentation, it states that it's enabled access to the PS4's "newly unlocked seventh core". You may remember Microsoft doing something similar when resolution-gate was at its peak.

The difference is that the Redmond firm publicised the change – perhaps as a means to get some positive press – while Sony has remained silent about the tweak. But this is not uncharacteristic for the company: it overclocked the PlayStation Portable without really telling anyone, and made numerous subtle improvements to the PlayStation 3 over the course of its life.

But the question is: what does this mean? Well, nothing just yet, as any titles currently in development will presumably be using the six cores. Moving forwards, though, it suggests that studios will be able to squeeze a little extra juice out of the console, which may help to steady the odd framerate or add an extra effect or two. Not bad, huh?