The Desktop CPU Isn't Dead, It Just Needs A Swift Kick In The Butt

This author thinks that the answer to making desktop processors exciting again is to add more cores, like Intel has done for their enthusiast line. The trouble with that is cost, but he hopes that potential competition from AMD will ultimately help with that. …adding more cores is probably the easiest and best way to boost performance at the high-end and convince consumers to replace that three-to-five-year-old PC. Enough apps are built to take advantage of multiple cores that users would see benefits immediately. Intel's Turbo Boost tech (particularly Turbo Boost 3.0, introduced in the aforementioned Broadwell-E CPUs but not available anywhere else yet) can maintain good performance for single-threaded or lightly threaded tasks. If the leaked roadmaps we cited before are to be believed, Intel may be planning to do this when the "Coffee Lake" processors are released in 2018.