I have a pet theory that the recent focus on CPUs with a high count of low-perf cores (this article is about intel but AMD has an equivalent offering) is being driven by hyperscalers like Amazon and the perverse incentive caused by their pricing structures.
Cloud providers have structured their compute offerings around dollars per core. This creates the incentive to deploy the densest possible core count processors, and zero incentive to make those cores faster.
It can't have escaped people's notice how slow cloud VCPUs are. My 6 year old crappy laptop CPU has the same single core perf as a cloud instance that costs hundreds of dollars per month. And the frustration is not just cost, when you actually need good performance for something that doesn't scale so well horizontally, it's hard to get it.
Cloud providers have structured their compute offerings around dollars per core. This creates the incentive to deploy the densest possible core count processors, and zero incentive to make those cores faster.
It can't have escaped people's notice how slow cloud VCPUs are. My 6 year old crappy laptop CPU has the same single core perf as a cloud instance that costs hundreds of dollars per month. And the frustration is not just cost, when you actually need good performance for something that doesn't scale so well horizontally, it's hard to get it.