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?
CAD or at least Solidworks is still really only able to use 1 core
This gets repeated every time, and it’s nonsense. SolidWorks is mostly single-threaded, but it’s also not a demanding application. Even PCs from a decade ago can handle assembling medium complexity models just fine. The few features that are demanding, like rendering and analysis tools like FEA, are in fact multi-threaded.
And if you actually need model assemblies so complex that single-threaded performance in the base app would become a problem, you’d be running a Quadro card anyway, and CPU performance wouldn’t matter.
Source: Industrial designer who worked with SolidWorks, PT Creo and Rhinoceros for a while after uni before transitioning to a different area of design.