This topic needs to be beaten down in a place that isn't about Skylake.
I take exception to a few things in this quote parade:
Let the fun begin.
Yeah, AMD's big opportunity here is if Intel is slow to respond with making 8 real cores reasonably priced.
Intel already makes 8-core CPU, and 10-core, and 12-core, and 14-core, and all the way up to 18 cores per socket. The only thing "stopping" Intel from dropping any number of those into a consumer market is demand.
No. The demand is already there (I know because I am part of it). And $1000 dollars for an 8 core is just greed; they do it because they can.
Quad-core is the sweetspot nowadays on the desktop, but since Bulldozer sucks and AMD is faltering, Intel still wants to force you into paying almost $200 for the cheapest quadcore when even Skylake Celerons should be quadcore in this day and age.
You will need to defend this with data. Just as a thought experiment, you must realize that the super-majority of the consumer computing space is working in the Microsoft Office suite (Outlook, Word, Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint, Project, VIsio) or some other open source version of the same. When those consumers aren't using local apps, they're using browser interfaces that are probably server-side execution with little Java applets. Even when they are gaming, the largest portion of that gaming is browser-based gaming, not locally installed, multi-gigabyte powerhouse games like we would talk about here on B3D.
All of the above items are lightly threaded at best. Consider than a desktop Core i3 can run (up to) four threads, which means it is likely more CPU than most of the population really needs.
I'd argue the reason why most applications don't use more than 4 cores is that we don't have more than 4 core CPU's in the mainstream. Pretty much all games these days make good use of 4 cores and most scale to some extent to 8. I've little doubt that if 8 cores were mainstream now (and had been for the last few years) then we'd be seeing pretty good scaling on them in lots of applications.
I take exception to a few things in this quote parade:
- The overwhelming majority of consumers are using applications that are lightly threaded at best
- The reason why most applications aren't using lots of cores (I contend that even saying "good use of 4" is a stretch for nearly all games) isn't because four cores aren't prevalent. Quite the opposite: we've had eight-thread CPU's since the i7 debuted. No, it's because code isn't that easy to parallelize, and this isn't a new piece of knowledge.
- All things considered, as a purchaser of a 3930k when the c2 stepping came out, I'd rather be back on a "slower" core i7 quad-core again. Nothing that I do uses these threads, outside of a rare video encoding / / transcoding app that goes so fast anyway that it doesn't matter.
- Cramming a zillion cores into a single socket eventually tilts the I/O to compute balance of the socket. There are workloads where this is not a problem, but personally I'd rather have multiple sockets when the scale gets to that point...
Let the fun begin.