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?
This is the crux of the issue. People talk about “ST workloads” vs “MT workloads”, but the reality is that single-threaded workloads largely do not matter, it’s all stuff that, at the very worst, is done after a few seconds. MT performance, on the other hand, can save you hours of productivity depending on what your work is.
We are long past the point where ST performance matters for the “snappiness” of systems. Zen 3, Alder Lake, M1 and newer are all more than perfectly “snappy” in any modern system. Gaming is the last use case where ST matters so long as you have a minimum amount of cores, but for professional use cases there’s nothing to even discuss, MT is the only thing that matters.
Good MT performance is contingent on good ST performance. Doesn’t really matter how many threads you have if they’re slow individually. Which will dig a hole faster – 64 toddlers with gardening spades, or one excavator?