Jonbwfc Yes, I’d forgotten that the PS4 has a special chip to aid with data streaming. Maybe they’ve figured out a way to let the CPU help the onboard streaming chip? Anyway, it’s just speculation.
One thing it’s always important to note is that all software comes to represent the organisational structure of the company that made it. The PS4 is an amalgam of open source FreeBSD and Sony’s proprietary graphical layer on top of it.
Anything in the OS layer is mega hard for Sony to change and fix, because it requires developers who know the OS stuff and most developers find the OS weird and scary. This is why the PS4 GUI is awesome but there are a lot of dodgy file system/network issues in PS4 that have never been addressed.
Sony have now been working with FreeBSD for a long time and are planning to support it for the future, so they may be more willing to invest in key complex architectural changes like this in a way they weren’t before. The cores change is one involving the grey area between system and user space which is not something you’d be confident in changing if you weren’t super happy you knew what you were doing.
This might also be why Sony have seemingly solved the age old background download speed bug that has been in PS4 for ages, and probably came from some mental network idiosyncrasy in FreeBSD no one was paid enough to invest the time in understandimg.
Anyway, the main takeaway is that with the knowledge that PS5 would need FreeBSD for the foreseeable future Sony might have fixed a lot of long standing OS issues that really needed fixing.