Maynard Handley (name99.delete@this.name99.org) on May 13, 2013 6:52 pm wrote:

> SMT) help with this to a small extent. They do help when I want certain tasks to run faster (the
> usual video encode, the slightly less usual large Mathematica jobs, the occasional situation where

The specialized video transcode hardware handles that faster than threaded software.

> I fire up three compute intensive tasks at once) and, per my earlier point, that's still pretty
> good --- if they speed things up once a week, what does it matter if they're mostly idle?

Well, it's the same as the original argument for RISC: a feature which greatly
speeds up an infrequent operation, but slightly slows down frequent operations,
is probably a bad idea.

On the wider point, second-guessing Intel's engineers is a big part of what
happens on this forum. On this particular topic, it's clear that designing
the same CPU core for use with the very different server vs desktop/laptop
workloads must involve some compromises: it can't be optimal for both. It can be
(and is) very good for both.