Over the weekend we consulted our contacts and can confirm that Core 6 has indeed been unlocked and is available for game developers to utilise. However, there are a couple of caveats here. First of all, it's highly likely that existing games will have no access to the additional CPU power by default - unless the developer in question decides to update the title via a patch to specifically add support.
Secondly, questions remain as to how much CPU time from the unlocked core developers actually have access to. When Microsoft unlocked the seventh core on Xbox One, the amount of resources available from the core at any given point would vary, based on OS requirements. For example, using voice commands could see up to 50 per cent of the core's resources tied up.
Right now it's not entirely clear whether similar conditions are in place at all on PlayStation 4, but one source informs us that PlayStation 4's debugging and analysis tool - called Razor - "splits the activity on that core between user and system", which does seem to suggest that the seventh processing core is shared to a certain extent between the OS and game.