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?
The difference on average across the 12 games was like 5% between the 7700x and 7600x’s 1% lows.
Average doesn’t matter. If the game I play uses parallelism well, I don’t care about the ones that don’t.
The difference in boost clock is only ~2%, so anything more than that is either due to core count or less (soft) thermal throttling from spreading the heat across more die area. And since they tested with a 360mm AIO, it’s probably not soft throttling.