[ddingus]

It's still relevant. Some applications remain single threaded due to data dependencies.

Mechanical CAD geometry kernels are one such application. Recently, I had a use case that demanded the peak single threaded performance.

In PC land, it's this chip clocked at 4.x Ghz: Intel® Core™ i7-4790K. It's multi-core performance is pretty great too, so it's not that big of a trade-off to maximize single thread performance.

I would be very interested in knowing what faster solutions exist. Are there any, regardless of instruction set?