I don't think its true that most people do web browsing. Its just an easy generalization to make. The world has thousands of industries and each specialty domain has their set of software suites that they need for their business. In my industry (pharma), and I'll adda caveat here that I haven't done a rigorous scientific analysis of every single workload, but off hand, all of our software is heavily dependent on single-thread perf. To be sure, there is some stuff that benefits from multiple cores.. dna sequencing/alignment/processing comes to mind, primarily because we're processing hundreds of GBs of data. But by and large, I would pick a CPU that has better single-thread perf. For our accounting folks who use quickbooks a lot, are not going to benefit "massively" from a high core count. For our facilities team that uses autocad.. again same thing .. I don't find a massive benefit from 10-12+ core systems. Sure you can always on a case-by-case basis invent scenarios which could potentially benefit from more cores, but this massive gain across the board that you claim is a bit of an exaggeration. IMHO/IME/YMMV/$0.02 etc..