I'm not sure what the takeaway here is. If desktop users don't need (or can't use) more cores, then don't get them - and call an end to the periodic performance

I'm not sure what the takeaway here is. If desktop users don't need (or can't use) more cores, then don't get them - and call an end to the periodic performance improvements, because CPUs won't get faster without more cores. Maybe that's fine. On the other side, high performance computing demands more computational power, and the only promising path forward (at this time) is parallelism. I'm not motivated by optimism, but by pragmatism. As a sidenote, I don't understand this section: > We look at computing for graphics, neural nets, signal processing, and Bitcoin mining, and we see a pattern: parallelizing algorithms work best on hardware that is (a) specifically designed to execute them, and (b) can’t do anything else! The same hardware is used for all of these things, and it was only (arguably) designed specifically for graphics (and even there "specific" is not certain).