> You only need single-threaded performance for 2 things, for the stuff that’s inherently serial like gzip, or to run programs made more than 5-10 years ago.
You must not be grand strategy game players. Any titles from Paradox and some other popular games are all limited by single core IPC. They are a great example of the limits of multi-threading, some processes and problems cannot be adapted to take advantage of it. If I get such a laptop I'd spend 50% of the time I use it playing such games.
> They are a great example of the limits of multi-threading
These are examples of lazy programmers and PC-only games. Consoles have many cores for decades and these cores are slower than PCs, developers of cross-platform titles have embraced multithreading for quite some time now.
Multithreading does have limits. Some things are borderline impossible to parallelize, examples include gzip, streaming encryption algorithms, or parsing long streams of HTML and JavaScript. However, vast majority of the CPU-bound stuff found in videogames scales just fine with CPU cores.
You must not be grand strategy game players. Any titles from Paradox and some other popular games are all limited by single core IPC. They are a great example of the limits of multi-threading, some processes and problems cannot be adapted to take advantage of it. If I get such a laptop I'd spend 50% of the time I use it playing such games.