Don't get me wrong, I'm not pro-AMD (only) or anti-Intel (although I am against their anti-competitive tactics). Intel's products are excellent performers, and AMD's less so, possibly. But just because that's the current competitive landscape, doesn't mean that will never change. AMD has a real chance at some success coming up, now that GF has a decent, modern, process to fab their chips with, and they've got a new architecture coming down the pipeline real quick now (Zen).
I'm more than willing to grab a Zen CPU when they come out, if they have at least Sandy Bridge performance and performance/watt, if they have a reasonable price for an 8-core. ($300-400, maybe?)
Though, I only paid $100 or perhaps $140 each for my two 1045T Thuban CPUs.
I was even thinking of getting some new motherboards, and dredging them out of the mothballs, and running them instead of my SKL G4400s. Dual-cores, no matter how much you OC them (well, within physical limits), still don't quite compare to a true Hex-core CPU.
The single-threaded speeds I get from my SKL G4400 when OCed past 4.4Ghz, are pretty nice, especially when coupled with a PCI-E 3.0 x4 M.2 SSD.
But, no AVX/AVX2, no HT, makes these CPUs still just a little ... dull?
If Intel ever really heeded the market, and came out with a true hex-core (or larger core count) CPU on their mainstream platform, I would probably buy it (price within reason) as soon as it came out. But for some reason, they seem stuck on quad-cores.
(And of course, ShintaiDK defends that decision, as if it were gospel, ignoring the fact that Intel initially released their Core2Quad CPUs, before "the software was ready" too. In fact, the existence of those quad-cores, whether they be MCM'ed or native (AMD's solution), is a large part of why we even have game engines that can take advantage of quad-cores today.)
Edit: In an attempt to get this thread back on-topic (Icelake and successor), when will we be seeing more than four cores on Intel's biggest mainstream consumer CPUs? Cannonlake? Icelake? Whatever comes next?