Most consumers use their devices for media consumption, games, and surfing the web. ALL of these are heavily multi-threaded. Yes, even dear old Javascript is parsed and compiled in multiple threads, concurrently GC'd and uses web workers, service workers, and webassembly.

In the business world, all the commonly-used software I can think of is heavily threaded as well. Generally, the remaining software that comes to mind is simple stuff that could run on a decade-old machine without too much trouble.

What typical programs are you running that require so much single-threaded performance?

Using Acrobat DC, searching for content in all PDFs in a folder takes ages. It is both slow AND single-threaded, the disk is barely moving.

Tried with Foxit and a few others, same thing. I had to seek indexed search apps, and those are few and far between and generally poor quality - kudos to Recoll[1] as the standout so far. But I'd much rather just search within the reader.

Anyway, it's infuriating, this should go about x times as fast as there are cores.

[1]: https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/

Windows Update, Windows Defender Antivirus, NTFS compression, maybe more I've forgotten.

Also old (and not-so-old) games.

Well, that's not at all a fair comparison. Who knows what that one core is doing? Not all algorithms are parallelizable, in fact most aren't. So doing standard, everyday things in code might still max out a core.

Exactly. So single-core performance wins.