[hddherman]

40% single thread increase, but most likely 100+% increase in core count. CPU manufacturers did not slap more cores on a CPU to get high benchmark scores, it's just one of the few viable options for increasing CPU performance.

[londons_explore]

Check top/task manager from time to time. It's pretty rare any desktop applications use more than 2 or 3 cores to the max.

That means those extra cores won't really help day to day performance.

[billti]

If you’re a dev (as I’m sure many here are), many big builds will max all cores for extended times. I had to up the cooling in my machine as building Chromium would regularly peg all 8 core for hours, causing thermal throttling to kick in and lower clock speeds.

[rbanffy]

Sometimes I manage to extract a little more performance by shutting down virtual cores to get lower thermal stress and better cache hit ratios. It's a very YMMV thing that depends on pretty much everything from the CPU microarchitecture and built-in power management all the way to the size of the fan, whether you polished the heat spreader on the CPU to the programs you are running and what the data they are processing looks like.

[hddherman]

My workloads are more of an outlier when compared to the general PC user crowd, but I do keep an eye on my CPU usage and it is often between 25-100% CPU usage, depending on the situation.

Workloads, where more cores really help out, are:

* re-encoding video files to save disk space (it's amazing what speeds I can reach with my Ryzen 5 2600X here!)

* IntelliJ (startup, indexing)

* running tests (can be configured to be very parallel)

* running JS heavy sites, like Jira (you would be surprised at how resource intensive websites can be nowadays)

* running more than one Electron based app (Spotify, Slack are surprisingly CPU intensive, especially if you have poor/no GPU acceleration support)

[yread]

single desktop app probably doesn't but you don't run just a single one. Chrome, IDE, database server, db client, web server, VMs, slack/teams/gitter, email client. Try provisioning a VM with single core and running them all at once inside...

EDIT: that said I wonder if you notice a difference between 4 and 8 cores in normal life