Intel and its Cores for Gaming + Developers >_>

As I see it, game engines need to run in as widest a variety of PC builds as possible, so asking for more than 4 cores could negatively impact sales quite drastically. Why would they risk tanking the sales at lauch for a questionable upgrade on performance, in a few years however it may be a safer bet.

Whenever there is a limited install base there is little point in developing for it. Why bother putting a lot of time, effort and money towards elements that less than 5% of customers will have. Once it starts becoming more standard and the customer install base has risen, then development efforts will be made to utilize it. That isn't saying no one will put the effort in, just it doesn't make sense to bother utilizing funds and effort that could have been better spent elsewhere in development. Plus there is always the risk that the technology will be abandoned (triple channel RAM for example, it came out with the first i7 and was dropped by the second i7 where dual channel remained standard.)

I'll try to make TL;DR version, bear with me.

Basically, 90% of game engine calculations are done by GPU - this is mainly rendering, everything - scene, lights, visible objects, invisible objects, animations, nearly everything. So what is CPU doing? CPU has basically only 3 tasks - handling game engine, as in, code of that game engine executing, calculating physics (GPU can do that, but CPU is capable too), and executing game-based logic.

To understand cores in CPU you must understand how they work in the first place - imagine you have 1000 distinct points of time in a single second. In each single one of those points, given task can be attached to CPU and performed. Some tasks are taking longer while (like compressing files to zip), other tasks are immediate (like assigning variable or doing 2 + 2 calculation).

Now, let's get back to those 3 CPU gaming tasks - handling game engine is basically handling commands sent to the GPU and everything executing - those are single instructions, same like you asking your friend to ride 30 KM on a bicycle - it costs you nothing to perform that task, you can tell your friends to do so as much as you want to.

Handling in-game logic depends on game genre, those are things like dialogue options, what should be happening, what is happening, entire AI, all decision trees and so on. This might look like much, but under the cover those are all algorithms and algorithms are being worked on since first PCs and optimized all the time - current CPUs can handle such things in notime, while game world itself is actually very closed in given point of time and there is fixed amount of things that can be happening - this is mainly due to optimization I mentioned.

Lastly, physics, this is one of the very few gaming-related tasks that can be done by CPU, and by physics I mean calculating speed, size, weight, reflections (not graphical ones), and how heavy armor affects your animation of jumping (if devs coded it that is). This can be done mainly because physics we know can be entirely stated by mathematical formulas, and therefore each thing happening can be calculated how it affects all other things, and so on. Handling physics is not as fast as telling GPU to work, but easy enough to be handled by CPU.

So as you can see, actual CPU load is actually pretty low mainly because your CPU doesn't have anything useful to do besides those 3 tasks when you play a game. Situation is entirely different e.g. with compiling code, zipping files or encoding a movie - those tasks are almost exclusively CPU-bound, and in this case your GPU is not doing anything, because things like compression algorithm doesn't work well with GPU calculations at all.

How many (virtual) cores game uses? Depending how well it's written, it's almost always 1, 2, or N where N is equal to number of virtual cores available on your machine. Why you see such low load and only X cores being used then? Because the load is so low that your OS decides it's not even worth it to balance the work on other cores, because it's either impossible, or would not speed up calculations that are happening. Imagine that you're drawing a picture from your favourite game - you could ask some of your friends to help you draw different parts of the picture at the same time (let's say up to 3 friends helping you), but at some point "cost" of synchronization and handling fixed amount of resources (piece of paper, pencils) is exceeding the "performance" you can get by drawing with your friends in parallel. A team of 4 will draw faster than a team of 1000 when you have a single paper (assuming everybody draws equal portion of image).

So why CPU can't help GPU in GPU calculations then? Because it's not effective. Currently what GPU can do in miliseconds of time, CPU is doing in several seconds, even minutes sometimes - cost of delegating some less complex parts to CPU is actually higher than doing it right away, on top of the fact of power usage and wasting resources that should be spent on something else. This is like you trying to move 50L of water from one container to another one, using a single cup, rather than at least 10L bottle.

... AND IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE TL;DR...

Better TL;DR - for gaming alone, 4 cores i5-7500 is more than enough for any game to come in near future. However, more cores can definitely come useful in CPU-bound tasks, such as compressing, compiling, encoding or doing math calculations. Good hardware is not only being used for rendering a game. Intel is not adding cores for gaming, even current amount of 4 is barely put to any use.

I guess they are for new generation of games, such as high end VR software. Having potentials isn't really bad.

Ashes of Singularity and Cities Skylines off the top of my head, suspect most similar games will go that way quite quickly. But in general your point is right, Intel HEDT is an e-peen thing for gamers rather than a practical, cost-effective solution and Threadripper will sit in the same vanity market. An 6/8 core Ryzen kinda makes sense cause it's a relatively affordable way to future proof/stream/not cry when five apps decide to randomly do stuff. A standard i7 still serves that same role on Intel's side.

They aren't for single person gaming at all, duh.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKJw8IKVYQ8

The Division uses 8 cores, maybe more. Some games can take more than 4, mostly strategy, sim.

they're not for gaming. and 18cores isn't really anything new for them either. 10years ago they were working on 80core cpus. Teraflops Research Chip

18 cores are very important for gaming, btw. 12K gaming!!

View attached image.

Ah yeah back in the days, when you needed new hardware or a new pc for VGA, more ram, a graphic card, when pc's cost a bunch. We got spoiled really, if no dev is going to take that dare anymore, why we won't see major improvements anymore.

I bought my 6-core i7 in 2015 and cannot really see any progress in using more core / threads. So no, 18 cores are not for gaming. And I'd choose AMD from my 2017 point of view, but this is another story.