Last decade I'm not so sure. I bought the very first readily available consumer quad core CPU a decade ago (the Q6600), two years ago I upgraded and I had to pay a huge premium because I wanted more than four (I got six!) cores. And that is just starting to change today.
Not that core count is everything but consumer desktop CPUs have stagnated quite a bit. Here's to hoping AMD stirs it up a bit.
Because the compute power for consumer CPU nowadays is good enough, the effort has been in reducing energy consumption. But if you look at the server / workstation side, you can get 20+ cores in a single dice.
Good enough relative to the competition perhaps.
Nowadays the CPU is the bottle-neck even when surfing the web and using simple (electron) text editors.
But that's not really a CPU problem but a software problem. And faster CPUs won't fix it, due to Wirth's Law.
Anything built with Electron is the anathema of simple.
Re:Is it time for open processors?
by imtringued on Saturday January 20, 2018 @05:19AM
(#16192849)
If you consider core count desktop CPUs have had massive increases in performance in the last year and will get another massive increase when 7nm arrives.
Intel's problems over the past year aside, they have done an amazing job pushing the limits of computation over the past decades.