4 cores and 8 threads is still plenty for most people.
Of course it is. I've been saying this since Ryzen came out. Even got banned for it.
So it seems the necessity of >4 cores depends on the processor brand being discussed.
I don't think you're being an honest part of the discussion if you truly think that even budget PC owners need 8 cores.
I'm precisely talking about scientific/professional use of a PC.
4 cores is fine. 8 cores are better... assuming you could utilize the 4 you had.
This has been the whole Ryzen theme for 2 years. Productivity, creativity, science etc. etc.
So these hundreds of millions of people who spend 8 hours a day looking at Excel don't need anything above an IGP. And, to be honest, most of them can live with 4 cores (or even 2). But Excel can use as many cores as you have, so going from 4 to 8 will let them spend less time watching the progress bar.
Reading some comments here, it seems like some people assume that high-end computing (high-end business PCs and workstations) are powerful in both CPU and GPU components. So an 8-core Ryzen is fine, because they'll be an expensive GPU as well.
This is not true. Most tasks done on computers are CPU-exclusive - simply because that's how computers work. There is a very big demand for computers with powerful CPUs and minimal GPUs.
In fact many top500 supercomputers run thousands of Xeons and don't have a GPU at all, which shows that CPU-exclusive loads scale way beyond 8 cores.
That's not true, heck Intel released a ULV chip with dysfunctional IGP. An efficient ULP dGPU like MX 1xx is good enough unless you're too hung up on battery life.
I'm not saying you can't use a CPU without a GPU (google: Xeon Platinum).
I'm precisely saying that there's a very large part of the market which is concerned about CPU performance, but can live with whatever GPU you put into the mix (as long as it can run two 4K monitors).
These people just won't pay for a dGPU, when IGP is good enough.
And since office desktops got really small lately, they also don't miss the big boxes that we used in the past.
I stay away from discussing things that I do sporadically or know virtually nothing about.
But you keep writing here...
How much does an MX150 cost according to you?
Possibly as much as a 1030. So?
dGPU is not the total cost here. In both laptops and desktops it affects the design.
I have one with 8250u in under $600
Which likely means you could have got an 8550u instead.
That's the whole point. One could use this money and get a more powerful CPU or something useful (larger disk, illuminated keyboard).
If you're fine with Intel HD, every dollar spent on MX150 is wasted. Why would people waste money?
6, 8 core APU - which are super expensive in notebook space.
Actually wrong: a 6-core 8850H is
CHEAPER than a 4-core 8650U. Both with HT.
$395 vs $409. Check it:
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/compare.html?productIds=124968,134899
AMD can easily slap a low power Zen2 model in there if more cores is what you want
That's the whole point of this discussion, isn't it? If AMD can do this, why don't they?
Intel did. And AMD was supposed to have the upper hand in core count.
