The M1 family certainly doesn't go into the direction of less cores, and even if you had a single one you could probably rowhammer during your timeslice and the

The M1 family certainly doesn't go into the direction of less cores, and even if you had a single one you could probably rowhammer during your timeslice and then patiently wait for the target process to execute. Since even individual computers execute random garbage code straight from the Internet (e.g. JS), there is still a needed for internal security. That being said, and even if I consider that a quite different subject, I agree that the current efficiency story of Intel is not very good, but I hope they will improve in a not so far future. The dev lifecycle of CPUs is quite long and it seems to be an obvious target. I suspect they will be forced to improve their efficiency, because that's actually were the performance potential is today (the current dissipation level of their last desktop CPUs is not reasonable, and prevents scalability). And trying to lower the core count also can yield to high consumption, e.g. if you want your performance back by increasing the frequency. Wide and "slow" is needed, and it is harder to increase the internal number of execution units per core and have them actually used, than to increase the core count -- plus ironically one way to do that is through HT, which goes against your wish to share less hardware. (Now if you compare their P-core and E-core in Alder Lake the story is more complicated, but their marketing figures seem very strange, so I won't conclude anything for now. The current instances of P-core we have is for that weird desktop market with unreasonable high TDP anyway.) Now if you really want miniaturized individual computers that would not be shared at all, I'm not sure the market will actually go into that direction because big systems will continue to be needed (and clusters are a niche mostly for HPC), and I'm not sure a "slightly more secure on smaller systems" market would be interesting enough. Esp. in an era of chip shortage. And also because it would still be bigger than a shared equivalent system make with the same techs... But if that's really a niche that has to be addressed, I suspect it would mostly be a matter for Intel to create new small and slower SKUs ("slower" compared to their desktops insanities) -- they even kind of have that already, but yes the physical miniaturization aspect is not handled yet -- that does not really depends that much on the cores, though. And even in those computers, I'm not sure there would be much demand for very low core counts. The threading of pretty much all workloads tends to increase, nowadays. One last point, after the e.g. Pentium 4 fiasco nobody really left the IPC race. AMD had some difficulties when trying "weird" ideas (part of which were because of their marketing communication), and then again a completely new design from scratch to market takes time. In general there was a pause of performance growth around 2016 for a few years, and that was mostly Intel having process problems and the rest of the industry catching up (and then overtaking them).