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?

  • 100GbE@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    Once you reach a certain number of cores (~6-8) it depends on the workload.

    Windows/File Explorers/Browsers/Games/General Use are all better off with single thread performance at this amount of cores.

    Multimedia/Editing/Rendering/etc are better off with even more cores.

    There is a balance between the two which nobody can solidly answer since it varies by use case.