That seems like a workflow issue more than a threaded application issue. I can see that the majority of consumer and business workflows only involve running one or two applications at a time, but the extra cores and hardware threads can make a difference if you need to run multiple applications simultaneously.
Office applications may be single-threaded, but if you need to open Word, Excel, and Powerpoint simultaneously they can each use a separate core. Similarly, you may need to run a web application at the same time as one or more Office applications. This sort of multiprocess parallelism still benefits from multiple cores.
As for "Windows ... is still single threaded", I'm not sure what you are talking about. The concept of a thread is part of the OS implementation.
> I can see that the majority of consumer and business workflows only involve running one or two applications at a time, but the extra cores and hardware threads can make a difference if you need to run multiple applications simultaneously.
If you need to run multiple applications simultaneously and they do sufficient amount of computations to generate noticeable load.
> Office applications may be single-threaded, but if you need to open Word, Excel, and Powerpoint simultaneously they can each use a separate core.
And idle. Unless you're actively editing a document, the applications are doing exactly nothing with their separate cores. And so far, our attempts to create four-armed employees able to write two concepts at the same time have hit some unexpected difficulties, so generally only one document is doing any CPU intensive work (and promptly hits 100% load for the single core it can use).
Excel would be an exception, if we did any heavy processing in it – which we don't. We have real databases for that. (And Postgres does scale nicely on its Xeon servers.)
> As for "Windows ... is still single threaded", I'm not sure what you are talking about.
Windows Defender / Security Essentials is singlethreaded, throttling all I/O to 50 MB/s effectively on an i5-6200U (and inducing crippling latency). Windows Explorer is singlethreaded (or has very unfortunate locking), so a single stalling I/O request (spinning up disk/CD drive; SMB over WAN) hangs up the device's entire UI. Windows Update is singlethreaded, resulting in hour-long churn while computing applicable updates. And so on. While you get some noticeable improvements from using a dual core, and a few more from using a dual core with hyperthreading, a full quad-core (with or without HT) is just a waste of silicon for our Windows clients.
> As for "Windows ... is still single threaded", I'm not sure what you are talking about. The concept of a thread is part of the OS implementation.
On a typical desktop workload, at least the ones users at work put on their machines (i.e. running Windows, Office, a browser, maybe a PDF viewer and sometimes something like AutoCAD for P&ID) it is rare to fully utilize more than one or two CPU cores.
In fact, for performance on a typical office PC, the CPU hardly matters any more compared to I/O and (to some degree) RAM (and insufficient RAM again becomes I/O load when the swap-fest starts). When one of our users complains about performance, unless the machine still has a Core2, rather than replacing the CPU, we tend to upgrade RAM and/or replace the hard drive with an SSD.
Office applications may be single-threaded, but if you need to open Word, Excel, and Powerpoint simultaneously they can each use a separate core. Similarly, you may need to run a web application at the same time as one or more Office applications. This sort of multiprocess parallelism still benefits from multiple cores.
As for "Windows ... is still single threaded", I'm not sure what you are talking about. The concept of a thread is part of the OS implementation.