Fairly illustrative example of technology S-curve. We haven't ran out of Moor's law yet, but the only available direction for performance improvement left is parallelism.
A return to exponential performance gains will come from parallelism is how I read your comment, and I agree. Multiple cores running at 5GHz for a few hundred dollars is an amazing amount of processing capacity.
ok, but how many of these do you need? would you notice a jump from a 16-core CPU to a 128-core CPU just due to a bunch of single threaded apps?
Anecdotally my several years old iMac [0] has 4-cores/8-threads and I already only notice more threads when parallel-compiling (compared to my 2C/4T i7-Skylake laptop).
For what? A web server (the most common application around) can use one for each simultaneous connection. They don't even have to be on the same box. A database server is limited on IO, but can use many CPU cores to speed-up things. A component on the latest "productivity" suite can probably use only one, but should require an entire one anyway, and your usual Win10 desktop has plenty of stupid stuff to run by its own, while your usual Linux desktop was already idling 90% of the time a decade ago.
It is always a matter of what are you doing. If your task is inherently serial, do you need it done only once?
For a ‘normal’ end-user desktop/laptop (not a server) I think you’d hit diminishing returns quickly after about 8 threads. If we’re tlaking long term growth we’d want e.g. a 128 core CPU (possibly only a few more years from today) to still be an improvement for the common usecase compared to the previous 64 core generation.
Also for the billions of computers around the most common application is probably a web browser, not a web server.
Not sure I entirely agree. You can develop more cores that are specialized for specific tasks e.g. sensor input, ML, etc. and get energy savings from that.
