Yes, it was the generation of the X360 and PS3. X360 was 3 core and the PS3 was 1+7 core (sort of a big.little setup).

Although it took many, many more years until games started to actually use multi-core properly. With rendering being on a 16.67ms / 8.33ms budget and rendering tied to world state, it was just really hard to not tie everything into eachother.

Even today you'll usually only see 2-4 cores actually getting significant load.