My guess would be PC users by count are
gamers > programmers > 3d renderers
For most gamers, seems like i7 or maybe i9 wins in current benchmarks. For programmers maybe ryzen is a better fit, but I bet it depends on your language.
Not as much as you would think, I have a ryzen 1700 I use for dev, mostly PHP (not a language that threads well) in an Enterprise environment.
Those extra cores/threads come in incredibly handy for virtualization, both dev environments and things like running windows for testing
Even VS2017 inside virtual box absolutely flies when given 16GB of RAM and 4 cores (8T).
For my day to day the cores are useful even if my primary language isn't using all of them.
I'm currently in the strange situation where my desktop running the main system in virtual box is faster than our production/spare servers.
I invoked the example of 3D rendering as it's the origin of most of these discussions among my co-workers.
Google right now, tells me there are:
155 million "gamers" in the US
3.6 million programmers in the US
I cannot guess that the CGI industry is higher than either of these numbers.
Now very much they may pay for bleeding edge, and spend more dollars on hardware than programmers. But I am at least 95% confident there are less people in the US running a 3d program on their desktop compared to running eclipse/visual studio/atom/vim.
1) How many are there?
2) it seems like you are usually not CPU bound. The people I know doing this spend 20 minutes waiting for a video to render than 6 hours uploading it to youtube. In most cases their bandwidth is a limiter 10x over their CPU. (Plus most of those people are on Mac anyway, so they don't even get this choice)