alt Hacker News> 16 core CPU and it rarely peaked over 30% utilization, often averaging ~25%. 30% utilization means a 6 core part (barring frequency/cache differences) should be able to eat that at 80% load.
As a rule I wouldn't be surprised if 90% of the stuff Civ 6 is doing can't be parallelized at all, but then for that remaining 10% you get a 16x speedup with 16 cores. And they're underutilized on average but there are bursts where you get a measurable speedup from having 16 cores, and that speedup is strictly linear with the number of cores. 6 cores means that remaining 10% will be less than half as fast vs. having 16 cores. And this is consistent with observing 30% CPU usage I think.
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My rule is more like I’d be willing to bet even odds that this could be sped up 100x with the right programmers focused on performance. When you lack expertise and things work “well enough” that’s what you get. Same for games or enterprise software.
If only 10% of the workload can be parallelized, then the best case parallelization speed up is only 10%. That doesn’t line up with the GP’s claim that Civ6 benefits from more cores.