I know we say this every time we increase core counts on consumer desktops ("no one is ever gonna need more than 2/4/8/16 cores!") but I legitimately feel like 24 full-fat cores is an absolutely insane number for a desktop and there's no way anyone except for compulsive gentoo recompilers would ever need more.
Threadripper/Epyc have been around long enough that some multi-thread heavy applications can scale to use a lot of cores. However, I believe that there are a bunch that only scale to use 32 cores (evident in 64-core Threadripper reviews), which could be a near-term "wall" for consumer processors. And if you look into it, 32-bit Windows 7/8/
10 supported only up to 32 threads (which could be 32 cores with HT/SMT disabled). 24 cores isn't a "wall", it would likely be at 4/8/16/32 for various applications you use. Do you need the performance of 24-32 cores? Not if you have to ask. An office PC can get by with a decade-old quad-core, no problem.
Moving to 24 cores using 2 CCDs means that a 12-core using only one CCD becomes cheap to make. The new 9800X3D equivalent would have 12 cores instead of 8. Below that, 10-core and 8-core are likely, with no 6-cores anymore.
@jeff7989 is right though, we could use more memory channels. It's probably necessary to push core counts further, and APUs can always benefit from it. You aren't getting that on the AM5 socket, it's physically impossible. Look at a pin diagram and you can see a lot of them are responsible for the 2 memory channels you do get.
I wonder if the next gen of game consoles are gonna stay on 8-core or move to 10-core.
The MLID leak claims the Zen 6 CCD is 12 cores, ~75mm^2, likely on TSMC N3. Single/dual CCX and the L3 cache amount isn't mentioned (32-48 MiB?). But that's around the same die size as previous chiplets.
I doubt it would be any trouble at all for new consoles to move to 12 cores. They could even use miniaturized 'c' cores instead, as long as limiting the clock speeds doesn't create an FPS bottleneck. The PS5 uses up to 3.5 GHz Zen 2, which the PS5 Pro raised to 3.85 GHz. So we are talking about a bottleneck for 240 FPS most likely.
