The core counts shown seemed grossly wrong (low) to me in all respects, from desktops to laptops to high end datacenter CPUs, so I looked into the assumptions.

The core counts shown seemed grossly wrong (low) to me in all respects, from desktops to laptops to high end datacenter CPUs, so I looked into the assumptions. The chart is from the perpective of CPUs going into HPC clusters, not high end SMP database servers in more commercial datacenters. The industry did have more than one core before 2004. The dataset author's 2016 blog explains "Similarly, I only consider CPUs for dual socket machines" [like Xeon Phi]. I'm not sure, given the HPC orientation why the dataset author didn't show specFP rather than specInt... but if I had to pick one, I'd also pick SpecInt.