As an avid armchair economist, the economies of scale cut both ways wrt CPUs. Sure, ever more cores push the diminishing returns envelope. Ever more clock speed also delivers diminishing returns as well. Same with IPC. At some point the cost of all of this makes little sense... until the technology catches up and makes it cheap enough that it does make sense. That's where AMD is now. 64C/128T HEDT chips didn't make sense before - it was too costly. But here we are, and we have applications that can utilize all of it.
The great equalizers are market demand and time. I guarantee there will be >64C/>128T HEDT processors in the future. Probably within 5 years. As long as you're still taking perceptible time to render images, and taking minutes to compile, there will be an advantage to ever-increasing CPU speed, be it from IPC increases, clock speed increases, or parallel computing via increased cores/threads. If you have someone making $30/hr sitting around waiting on rendering images or compiling, it's just a matter of time before if becomes cheaper to just buy a faster CPU.
That's all true in its own way, and my preferred paradigm. But the $30/hr guy, if he's truly constantly sitting around waiting as jobs come in, then it makes a lot more sense to lease on-demand big compute, perhaps into the thousands of CPUs. That's essentially what MS is after with Azure, moving diffuse compute elements into a more streamlined data services platform.
And of course on a more specific level, the folks at TurboRender are doing Premiere Pro heavy lifting hosting for nominal fees.
In the example where you have one or more $30/hr guys waiting on work, that path will always have a higher potential than a box on the desk. It's kind of early days at present, but it's highly serialized data that isn't overly latency sensitive, so as compute process threading gets more advanced, the big cloud services providers will only grow in relevance.
It could be a situation where :
8C/16T 3700X : 6.5hrs
64C/128T TR4 : 50 minutes
Cloud Render : 25 seconds
The architecture of big data services is utterly fascinating, because of the logistics of load balancing and trying to optimize for minimal waste. Following the example above, a cloud rack farm with core multi-terabit bandwidth and East/Central/West coast datacenters might have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of blades and other Rackmount metal. Obviously if demand was too intense at a given time, dedicating enormous numbers of cores would be less possible. On the other hand, if you spin each job up extremely aggressively, you clear the path for the next job coming through.
I mean, I can't say it enough : the carcasses are piling up.
Local email servers, Exchange et al are nearly extinct
Local web servers are basically DOA
Local domain controllers are a dying breed
Local data storage is now more commonly smart NAS if any whatsoever, invariably tied to cloud storage mirror
Loads of specialty professional software has gone cloud side. I worked extensively with Time Matters and Timeslips, supporting midsize law firms, but that is also on the last gasps. Ditto the client and scheduling software for Healthcare, HVAC, etc. The local install is just a memory.
CMS apps and Salesforce, now basically entirely cloud side.
It's just endless. Thankfully the root of the PC : a capable platform, CPU, ram, OS, and I/O, is still going strong. The stupid idea of giving everyone tablets didn't pan out, mainly I believe because they are inefficient for intense data interfacing vs a mouse, keyboard, and as many monitors as you need or want. But instead of running all local apps and off of local network resources, people are running the bulk of typical tasks via cloud apps, cloud storage, etc.
Idk. I don't think PC is a dead end by any means. It just feels like the pressure to increase performance is becoming more rare than ever. A $5k over the top PC circa Athlon 64 FX60 days or Core 2 Extreme type, it STILL wasn't all that fast even way back then. I/O was terribly constrained, and loading apps and running daily multitasking was something that made probably most computer users period wish they had a faster, better PC to use.
But now? A $599 PC with an nVME solid state and lower mid-range CPU w/basic or integrated video is enough to make nearly every regular user's experience almost instant. Word, Excel, Outlook, Acrobat, a web browser or two, perhaps Pandora or Apple Music streaming some subtle tunes while they toil away. But most people that I deal with no longer have any issues with performance even on shockingly old stuff as long as it's configured well and running SSD. 95% of office worker or non gamer home users can do almost any common task virtually instantly. Remember splash screens? Haha those old $5k workstations of 2005-2006 would take many seconds to load Photoshop, or even a nasty mid-aughts flash-infested website. Now systems a tenth that cost or less and you barely get to see a splash screen. By the time you get to Ryzen 3k and Coffee Lake stuff, if you have a PCIe nVME SSD and adequate ram (8GB still totally fine with an SSD for basically everyone besides true power users), opening things feels nearly telepathic, like clicking on things just 'reveals' what was already open, instead of the actual fact that it's opening with 30-50x the storage bandwidth compared to spinner era.
Idk man. I guess we'll see. I just don't see a mass market support for pushing the core envelope all that much more. 99% of PC users in 1995 could use a faster PC. Probably 85% by 2005 also would have noticed a faster PC. Today? I run into people whose Phenom or Sandy Bridge rig needs replacing, and I give them a kick-ass 2019/2020 rig, and they can't even tell me the difference. Things just change.
I actually think gaming will be the final cloud domino to fall. The current infrastructure is a little too erratic and even minor latency feels like garbage to experience, and I can't see any paradigm shifts to get us ~1-2ms global latency any time soon. But basically everything else people do on PCs can be a 'service'
If Windows itself ever goes full streaming + thin client as the default, I'll probably just puke on my shoes, give up, and move into a Kaczynski cabin in Montana and never look back.
I don't want any of what I'm describing to be the defacto reality, but at the same time I can't see how we won't get pushed off that cliff.