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?

      • einmaldrin_alleshin@alien.topB
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • Tman1677@alien.topB
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      1 year ago

      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.