I build art using an M1 Ultra with 20 cores. Many times a day, I have all cores running for 5-20 seconds at a time. I have also never heard a fan running in my Mac Studio. Having a single core that runs at a crazy speed but is cooled by some crazy cooling fluid will not make much difference to me. I can see a single-thread game being helped by these processors, however. I can't see anyone being silly enough to run these in a datacenter all day long unless you build it in space.

I agree but I just wanted to point out, in case you're curious, that it's actually harder to dissipate heat in a vacuum because you can't use ambient air for convection. An underwater data center though...

Single threaded games is not a thing today, so not something to worry about.

Besides, games are GPU bound, not CPU bound for the most part.

Depends on what you do. This is still a consumer cpu so having fewer faster cores benefit the average consumer application more.

The time taken for any process is still limited by Amdahl's law. You can't make inherently serial parts any faster by throwing more cores at it.

I disagree. Any CPU you get nowadays has a minimum of 4 cores which is plenty for the average consumer application. The most basic things people do are still bottlenecked by ST more than MT such as email, browsing, messaging. Even most AAA gaming doesn't scale more than 8 cores.

It’s not about a single application scaling to all cores but modern OSes do A LOT in the background

Even on my decade old CPU, all those background OS processes fit into a single core.

And those background tasks can be scheduled onto the slower cores.

Basic things like compression can be needed for a consumer application. And it's just one example.

So I completely disagree with "2 cores are enough for consumer application" idea.

And it's even further form truth for games. Last time I looked at something like Cyberpunk 2077 in the debugger, it had 81 threads. 81! Part of it were vkd3d-proton ones, but only a small part.

And it actually does load CPU pretty evenly if you monitor it, so I'd say it scales OK.

Cyberpunk may not be an extreme outlier, but it's definitely better than the average game at making effective use of more than a handful of CPU cores.

The data those threads are touching is just as important. Cache locality is hugely important to many game workloads.

Not the case for gaming, single core performsnce is still king for the average game.

For average game from 10 years ago - may be. Not for modern games. For them - GPU performance is king, not single core CPU one.