[mrb]

«Very few developers are prepared to write code that can efficiently use 256 threads / machine»

This junk justification has no longer been relevant for years. Most developers don't care because (1) they rely on core applications that are already multi-threaded (web servers, SQL engines, transcoding, etc), or (2) in today's age of containers, VMs, etc, it doesn't matter to them. Now we scale by adding more containers and VMs per physical machine. Bottom line, data centers always need more cores/threads per machine.

[cjhanks]

Correct, if you partition a 256 core machine into 32 virtual 8-core machines partitioned by their NUMA architecture - you are relatively unaffected by core count (minus the consequence of some scheduling algorithms not tuned for N > 8).

Unsure what the percentage of VM's that use no time sharing or oversubscription is though.