[pedrocr]

Maybe for 64 that's true but for mainstream usage getting 8 cores in a laptop instead of 4 is a massive gain. That's effectively what has happened in the current laptop lines with AMD having twice the cores with the same power usage and single-thread performance. Here's the comparison of the top-spec AMD and Intel CPUs available in the just released T14s:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i7-10610U-vs-AMD-...

If your workload is running a single-app that may be underused but particularly in home-office mode I'm constantly doing VCs, having 4 or 5 browser tabs that are heavy, Office for documents, etc. It doesn't matter if all those are a single thread, I'd be filling up the 8 cores and probably taking advantage of the 16 threads from SMT as well.

[pjmlp]

Except mainstream usage is mostly about Core i3 and i5 laptops, yes even for coding.

Those are the typical units that externs get from customers' IT, when it isn't some kind of cloud based VM.

And regular consumers don't even know what they own, rather what the guy at the store or some relative has given as advice.

[pedrocr]

All Intel options on the T14s are 4 core. The only other AMD option is still 6 core. The slower AMD part is still twice as fast as the fastest Intel chip:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i7-10610U-vs-AMD-...

AMD wins on price as well. That people don't usually make good buying choices is not an argument about CPU performance.

[pjmlp]

It is because at the end of the day that dictates what stays on the market and what goes home.

I thought we have learned by now that it isn't the best tech that wins.

[pedrocr]

Your contention was that the extra performance provided by AMD was not usable, not that it wouldn't win in the market. So we were indeed discussing who had the best tech, even if that's not all that matters for commercial success.

[pjmlp]

Because those things go hand in hand, the large majority of developers aren't doing HPC, Fintech or work at FAANG, or even posting on HN and Reddit, rather they are the so called "dark matter developers" whose applications must run on those Core i3 and i5 used by the consumers at large.

As such most developers only bother to use what they already know and take very little effort for adding any form of parallelism or concurrency to their applications.

Android and UWP since the start have taken architecture decisions that forbid synchronous code, because both companies came to the conclusion that if that would be available, the developers would write single threaded code as they have been doing for years, so they took that option out of the platform.

[pedrocr]

You've just switched to a totally different discussion. I don't agree with it either, because I see everyone around me in home-office, not even developers just workers in a normal corporate environment, that can definitely use that extra performance. But that wasn't the point being discussed.