Here's analysis of a prior LTT video showing 1/3 of cores at 100%, 1/3 of cores at 50%, and 1/3 idle cores:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqSCRZJl7S0
In any case, CS2 can take advantage of far more cores than most games.
Things like games, desktops, browsers, and such were designed for computers with a handful of cores, but the core count will only go up on these devices - a very pedestrian desktop these days has more than 8 cores.
If you want to make software that’ll run well enough 10 years from now, you’d better start using computers from 10 years from now. A 256 core chip might be just that.
the standard consumer computer of today has only a few cores that race-to-sleep, because there simply isn't that much to do. where do you imagine the parallel work will come from? even for games, will work shift off the GPU onto the host processor? seems unlikely.
future-proofing isn't about inflating your use of threads, but being smart about memory and IO. those have been the bottleneck for decades now.
Because the cores will be there, regardless. At some point, machines will be able to do a lot of background activity, learn about what we are doing, so that local agentic models can act as better intelligent assistants. I don't know what will be the killer app for the kilocore desktop - nobody knows that, but when PARC made a workstation with bit-mapped graphics out of a semi custom built minicomputer that could easily serve a department of text terminals we got things like GUIs, WYSYWIG, Smalltalk, and a lot of other fancy things nobody imagined back then.
You can try to invent the future using current tech, or you might just try to see what's possible with tomorrow's tools and observe it first hand.
They scale very well for web and db servers as well. You just put lots of containers/VMs on a single server.
AMD EPYC has a separate architecture specifically for such workloads. It's a bit weaker, runs at lower frequency and power and takes less silicon area. This way AMD can put more such cores on a single CPU (192 vs 128 for Zen 5c vs 5). So it's the other way round - web servers love high core count CPUs.