I bought a 12 core 3900X. Outside of the very narrow domain of professional tools I built it for, I'd have been better served with a quad core desktop Tiger Lake.
Most things aren't strictly single core any more and you're running multiple apps, but after you pass two cores with HT you've already soaked up most of that extra parallelism for everyday tasks.
Considering you can get a workstation with 64 cores and 16 is now high end consumer, the single core performance bottleneck is real.
Chrome might spawn a bunch of processes but they aggressively sleep all but your active tabs.
I believe the reasoning goes, Chrome isn't processor limited. Spotify isn't processor limited. Etc...
The use for multi core at performance is rare, I'm potentially writing a program for the first time in my life that uses parallel processing. The goal is to run this program a few times a year. No one would be buying a processor for me. They buy a computer for CAD guys, video card priority, ram, etc...
And the event that you are doing large scale performance computing, was Intel a monopoly there?
More to the point, no one buys enthusiast or professional grade CPUs to run chrome or excel. They buy them to run games or do professional compute tasks (video rendering, 3d rendering, photo editing, code compiling, etc.). The companies that work in these spaces have realized that they can't write single threaded code any more. For example, the two big games I play, Hunt:Showdown (cryengine) and Modern Warfare (custom engine) are both happy to use all sixteen logical threads of my Ryzen 3700x. Gone are the days when gamers only cares about single core performance.
> Gone are the days when gamers only cares about single core performance
Unfortunately that's not true.
I closely follow popular hardware subreddits (which are disproportionally gaming oriented) and read a fair share of comments every day. The old mentality is still prevalent. The limit gamers care for multi-core is the # of cores game consoles use. People still happily recommend a 4-core CPU over a 6-core CPU with ever-so-slightly-lower ST performance for new builds.
I'm not meaning by my comment to say that every person in the world is fully informed. However this knowledge about multicore scaling is starting to trickle through the community. It is only in the last few years it has started to be valuable to have more cores for AAA action games, so it is understandable to have outdated knowledge.
>People still happily recommend a 4-core CPU over a 6-core CPU with ever-so-slightly-lower ST performance for new builds.
and that is reasonable if you are focused on the bulk of games available today, and not next year or 5 years from now, and you don't want to do any streaming while gaming.
My whole point was that AAA games coming out today can utilize more than the traditional one or two cores -- more than four even. I'm not sure if it applies to all games but if someone is playing a CPU-intensive game today, the most likely candidate is Warzone, and that thing can put the hurt on eight cores at once. Likely other modern FPSes do also, or will in the very near future.
The only reason to get a new CPU is to play new games, as any decent CPU can run anything older than say three years. If you're buying a CPU for today's games, more cores will tend to help at least among enthusiast CPUs. It is not good advice to forego a large fraction of cores for a small increase in single-thread performance, at least at a given price. Threadrippers are probably not needed though.
