For much of the 2010s, we were stuck with mainly dual-core and quad-core CPUs in PCs. However the arrival of Ryzen shook the PC industry, causing a rapid increase in core counts. At the time, there was fervent discussion on this matter, with many questioning if more cores were worth it, and how many cores are more than enough?
So how do things stand today? The latest Intel and AMD consumer processors top out at 24 and 16 cores respectively. What extent of modern software can take advantage of all those cores? What modern workloads are still bottlenecked by single threaded performance?
Depends on your workload.
For most of what I do with sound, video and textfiles of various formats, single thread is not very relevant.
Occasionally you may want to convert a long audiobook that comes in a single file and audio is generally single threaded. But that is still only a minor inconvenience because it also converts in the hundreds of real time speed on a single core.
And if it was important enough, then it’s totally possible to write scripts that divide the file in small portions to distribute amongst workers, exactly like it has been done for video conversion where much more compute is needed and this kind of scenario is more realistic.
What about web browsing?
Web browsing RAM speed/size and crypto acceleration makes the biggest impact generally which is why Apple CPUs do so well there. That said web browsing is a pretty broad spectrum as they can run essentially arbitrary code depending on the website.
ANYTHING thats sold as new stock nowadays should do the job MORE than fine.
You would think so, but there are some really bad SoCs out there, using only Arm A5x series cores that have no business rendering a website and will give you an authentic early 2010s mobile web browsing experience.
This is the crux of the issue. People talk about “ST workloads” vs “MT workloads”, but the reality is that single-threaded workloads largely do not matter, it’s all stuff that, at the very worst, is done after a few seconds. MT performance, on the other hand, can save you hours of productivity depending on what your work is.
We are long past the point where ST performance matters for the “snappiness” of systems. Zen 3, Alder Lake, M1 and newer are all more than perfectly “snappy” in any modern system. Gaming is the last use case where ST matters so long as you have a minimum amount of cores, but for professional use cases there’s nothing to even discuss, MT is the only thing that matters.
Good MT performance is contingent on good ST performance. Doesn’t really matter how many threads you have if they’re slow individually. Which will dig a hole faster – 64 toddlers with gardening spades, or one excavator?