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?

  • crazyates88@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    For gaming, I think cache is more important than single threaded performance, tho. A 5600X3D is faster than a 5800X in gaming, even though the 5600X3D has fewer cores and lower clocks.

    A single core benchmark (or any single core workload that doesn’t utilize the cache) will only reflect the clock speed between the two, not the gaming performance.