Gabriele Svelto (gabriele.svelto.delete@this.gmail.com) on May 10, 2013 3:45 am wrote:
> There's also a lot of client-side applications that benefit from it. Compilation of large programs is a good
> example and there's tons of content creation, simulation, etc... applications that also benefit from it.

To judge that fairly, you would need to have an equivalent amount of effort
going into designing SMT and non-SMT cpu's with the same hardware resources.
Instead, what we have is a bunch of (very good) Intel cpu's with all the overhead
of SMT built in, whether or not you're using it. And we also have some much less
good AMD cpu's, without SMT.

Under the circumstances, since you're paying the die area cost and clockspeed cost
of supporting SMT, then the fact that many apps go faster with SMT than without
is not particularly surprising.

I think it's probably a good idea on the whole for servers. I suspect it isn't
such a good idea for client/desktop/mobile; but what we get these days, at least
for desktops, is a compromise between server and client requirements.