I have an 8 core PC at home with 32GB of memory and haven't seen anything use all 8 cores.
Buying a PC/Mac with so many cores is the equivalent of buying a Bugatti Veyron and being stuck in city traffic with it. All that power and speed but nowhere to go!
Not sure who pays for that kind of power to sit unused on their desktop, maybe people with more money than brains?
You obviously have not done 3D animations, ray tracing, major video editing, or heavy duty simulation science. Those are the thing that use 18 or even more cores in a workstation grade computer, sometimes in realtime. I was looking at Intels Xeon processor page and their new Platinum line starts with 20 cores. Some had 60. I saw one that was priced over $60,000 for a single processor chip! Yes, there is software that will use those cores and they do produce lots of heat!
“Problem: What software is going to use 18 cores? Answer: NONE. Probably not any in the near future either.”
Didn’t you just say you’re a “heavy virtualization user”? Uh huh... Virtualization is one area that can very efficiently use multicore.
More and more software is being written to take full advantage of multicore, since that’s the only way to get major speedups these days. Clock speeds are only creeping upwards, largely due to power consumption (and heat) going as the square of clock speed. Even the most recent graphics APIs (Metal, Vulkan and DirectX 12) are fully multithread capable.
That said, there should be a couple of other options between 8 and 18 cores as well.
It’s worth noting that AMD is about to come out with workstation/server CPUs with 32 cores that directly support 64 threads via hyperthreading...