It was recently confirmed that Microsoft has made Xbox One more powerful by improving the control of the system's eSRAM, something developers say has led to major improvements. But this doesn't seem to be the only thing that Microsoft has changed, if a new leak is to be believed.
According to Digital Foundry, Microsoft has also given more CPU power to developers by letting them tap 50-80 percent of a seventh processing core since October of last year.
Just as with PlayStation 4, two CPU cores has been reserved for other purposes (like running the operating system with all features in the background while playing games), but now developers can cancel title-specific voice commands and several other Kinect features in order to get more hardware juice for games instead.
It does somewhat interfere with regular voice commands for the operating system (like shouting "Xbox - record that"), and therefore the advantage could come down to 50 percent, back up to 80 percent when nothing is shouted. This does, of course, make development somewhat harder since developers can't predict when voice commands for the operating system will be used. Digital Foundry does however write that it's something that Microsoft will address in a future SDK update.
Digital Foundry ends the article by stating: "The ability to tap into more processing power could perhaps explain why Assassin's Creed: Unity runs smoother on Xbox One than it does on PS4, and also why traffic-heavy junctions in GTA 5 see a smaller hit to performance on the Microsoft console."
It remains to be seen if and how this will have any affect on the games released 2015 and beyond. We await more news with interest.