[tjoff]

Last decade I'm not so sure. I bought the very first readily available consumer quad core CPU a decade ago (the Q6600), two years ago I upgraded and I had to pay a huge premium because I wanted more than four (I got six!) cores. And that is just starting to change today.

Not that core count is everything but consumer desktop CPUs have stagnated quite a bit. Here's to hoping AMD stirs it up a bit.

[cm2187]

Because the compute power for consumer CPU nowadays is good enough, the effort has been in reducing energy consumption. But if you look at the server / workstation side, you can get 20+ cores in a single dice.

[tjoff]

Good enough relative to the competition perhaps.

Nowadays the CPU is the bottle-neck even when surfing the web and using simple (electron) text editors.

[mpweiher]

But that's not really a CPU problem but a software problem. And faster CPUs won't fix it, due to Wirth's Law.

[pjmlp]

Anything built with Electron is the anathema of simple.

[imtringued]

If you consider core count desktop CPUs have had massive increases in performance in the last year and will get another massive increase when 7nm arrives.

[tjoff]

This seems to only reinforce my point?