"Thanks AMD!"
Half of you mouth-breathers won't even use those cores. It reminds me of an old man buying a Corvette to drive it the speed limit. Remember that more cores is more power draw and more heat... it was never the design intent because the typical PC user wants (see: actually needs) low power draw and clock speed.
Also, no, these processors becoming more available to consumers will not lead to video games making use of more threads. If they could, they would-- it's not that simple.
First of all, "If they could, they would" argument is so funny, my wife is laughing, and she is human science major, so not at all technical person - they can, and they should, they just don't cause it's easier and more convenient. Some game developers do, in fact, use the available multi-thread coding options, and it scales rather well with multi-core/multi-thread processors.
On the other side of the story, for average consumer, this new "trend" on intel side allows average user to buy MUCH cheaper i3, that should now be 4C/8T and have i3 9300(k - hopefully) variant of processor for fraction of the price of new i7, that outperforms (much) more expensive i7 6700k with much less power draw... in theory.
And YES! it is THANKS TO AMD, cause w/o AMD intel would just keep pushing 2C and 4C processors to mainstream with or withought HT for growing prices and not much gain except for 5-10% increased performans between generations.
It's what's happening on GPU market atm where we don't have any clear threat to Nvidia on high-end GPU scale, and less and less on low-mid, so there is no real reason to give better GPUs for lower prices, even though they do work on them, have designs etc.
All of you that say "Ice lake was planned 10 years ago, supposed to be released 3 years ago" and similar theories, while all of that IS true, there is NOTHING that supports the fact that same ice lake CPU could have been released in 2C4T, 4C4T and 4C8T variants instead, plus mobile.
If you see 2 generations behind, i9 7x00 was released for almost triple the price of i7 8700k with higher core count that "regular" i7 7700k, that draws less power, and actually outperforms the said i9 in many cases (even the one with 10C20T) - i think this was actually planned by Intel as super high-end solution for extreme gamers/enthusiasts, before AMD demolished their plans with those of their own. I was hugely surprised by seing that product getting released at a time we knew about new 8700K, I was actually even more surprised that people actually bought them.
2Y later, 1-2 generations later (depending on count of actual generations and filler ones) we have i7 with 8C16T as mainstream for "normal" prices, and possibly 4C8T in form of a (highly probably) cheap i3 for regular games looking for affordable solutions with HUGE leap from their i3 with 2C4T in terms of in-game performanse.
Someone still thinks that intels move has NOTHING to do with AMD? lol, rofl, sure, they thougth of it on their own out of the goodness of their heart.
