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?
Probably (it widely depends), it’s very useful to increase core counts to about 8 cores in most cases. After that, the actual practical returns are greatly diminished. So, moving from 8 to 16 grants only 15-20% better performance, etc.
I would much rather take 8 cores with Zen 5 performance per clock and frequency of 8 GHz rather than 128 cores with Zen 1 performance per clock and (all-core) frequency of 3.8 GHz. In a vast majority of workloads, the former would outperform the latter.
May the Liquid Nitrogen be with you!