And mining. Ethereum mining is very memory intensive, so they had to limit memory bandwidth and find other ways to make up the performance for games. That’s why you don’t see 384 or 512-but memory bus anymore, they’re all as low low low as you can go. A 128-bit bus isn’t uncommon, sadly.
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.
People keep saying this, but does it tho? I’ve seen multiple benchmarks where 8 slower cores are faster than 6 high speed cores. I would say cache is more important that single threaded performance in 2023.
I imagine it like a construction site for a new house. Do you want 10 master craftsman who can do everything or 300 guys off the street who kinda know what they’re doing and are really on there for grunt labor. For the tasks that require lots of manual labor you want the 300 guys, but for those tasks that aren’t easy or aren’t very parallel, you want fewer but more capable cores.