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?
Single-core is more important for 99% of normal consumers. Most office productivity apps or web browsers are only lightly threaded.
Also, scaling cores efficiently is hard both in software and in hardware. 10 cores at 1x performance are going to be a lot more efficiently used than 20 cores at 0.5x performance.
First statement is definitely true, second statement is generally true but is super software and implementation dependent. Generally the issue isn’t fast vs slow cores it’s keeping all of those cores fed with data with memory and the OS scheduler handling events that makes a larger difference.
Obviously software makes the biggest difference of all in how many threads it allocates and where. This is an especially difficult issue as optimizing software for a server and for say a gaming PC are totally different problems with different optimal solutions