[jchw]

1. It is unlikely the CPU is a serious bottleneck in many of those circumstances. Even if it takes a measurable amount of time, that does not mean a faster CPU will make a meaningful improvement, if even measurable improvement. If you think it will, try overclocking and measuring your gmail load times.

2. Like I said, in my experience Ryzen also competes just fine in single core. It just also decimates in multicore. I’d rather have some tasks run significantly faster than have some run very slightly faster. But that is disregarding the fact that not all tasks are the same and it does in fact win some categories. These CPU architectures are more divergent than usual for lately.

3. Things you think aren’t parallel are. Video games using modern graphics APIs are in fact able to exploit multicore CPUs. Browsers absolutely exploit multicore CPUs. Your system in general will exploit multicore CPUs so during general usage when you are doing more things and have more software running, single core performance will be hurt less. And so on.