Although many complex modern apps are designed to run on multiple cores
and threads, single-core performance is nevertheless still important when you
rely on legacy software. Many older games, especially those built on DirectX 9,
use just one or two cores. And manufacturing variabilities mean that there are
slight variations in each core’s maximum performance, so better performance
from each core “lifts all sails,” as an AMD spokesperson puts it.
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iTunes to encode a series of music tracks. This is legacy software in spades—
Apple has already announced iTunes’ extinction—and it’s decidedly single-
threaded, which means that piling on more cores and threads doesn’t help.