games are getting bigger and more complex in size and geometry,I say they'll both be slouches in 4-5 years time,no matter if it's 6/12 at 5G or 8/16 at 4.5.
it'll just not happen overnight,it'll happen gradually.
people quote 4 threads vs 6/8 but the results we have suggest that the transition in the future will be far smoother than that.
Neither of those CPUs will be slouches in 4-5 years time. We have 12 threads available and games do their threading better. Its no longer the pure need for physical cores, but mostly threads. Same goes for the development on consoles. You need a baseline of physical cores and additional threads can run just fine through SMT. Consoles even reserve some grunt for the OS, not unlike a PC.
It echoes the development we saw when HT/SMT was NOT used by games. There was one fat game thread, and a few smaller ones running on the other cores. The net gain from additional cores wasn't there. We're past that now, and this core count doubling will not be going on indefinitely for MSDT either. I struggle to see how that mixes with dual channel RAM, at some point the bandwidth is saturated when you load up.
6/12, or 8/16 right now is a matter of choices between cost and usability. As in, if you have something you run ALONGSIDE your games, then definitely get some extra cores over 6 physical, because you will be having more hot threads to run that won't fare well over SMT alone. At that point they start fighting with game performance.
If we look back to the quad core era. The i7's with HT are even today still not completely obsolete. You still see people defend them for gaming and that is because in MOST situations they can still produce 60 FPS. The odd stutter, MAYBE, but that is situational. It is a writing on the wall. But at the same time, it is also 2020 now - 7-8 years (!) past quad core mainstream. Going by that timeline, in 5 years time, 12 thread CPUs will be as relevant as an i7 quad is today. There is no denying that even you still game on it
