But realistically, most workloads of the kind you would run on these machines don't scale benefit from multithreading as much as single core performance. At least at home these machines will do things like video streaming, router, or serving files. Even if you want to use it in the living room as a console/emulator, you are better off with higher single core performance and fewer cores than the opposite.

> But realistically, most workloads of the kind you would run on these machines don't scale benefit from multithreading as much as single core performance. At least at home these machines will do things like video streaming, router, or serving files.

You're probably right about "most workloads", but as a single counter-example, I added several seasons of shows to my N305 Plex server last night, and it pinned all eight threads for quite a while doing its intro/credit detection.

I actually went and checked if it would be at all practical to move my Plex server to a VM on my bigger home server where it could get 16 Skymont threads (at 4.6ghz vs 8 Gracemont threads at ~3ghz - so something like 3x the multithreaded potential on E-cores). Doesn't really seem workable to use Intel Quick Sync on Linux guests with a Hyper-V host though.

> in the living room as a console/emulator,

if you are talking about ancient hardware, yes, it's mostly driven by single core performance. But any console more recent than the 2000s will hugely benefit from multiple cores (because of the split between CPU and GPU, and the fact that more recent consoles also had multiple cores, too).