Stubabe (Stubabe.delete@this.nospam.com) on May 14, 2013 12:09 pm wrote:
> The assumption here is that without SMT Intel might have invested more in single threaded performance.
> I would say the opposite, since without throughput workloads exploiting wide chips via SMT I doubt
> Intel's architects could have justified wide power efficient designs like Sandybridge onwards
> since the gains would have been to small in too many cases. But with SMT they can continue to
> throw resources at fast fat cores (as it befits more than just one set of corner cases) rather
> than just giving us a die full of gutless cores and basically just another GPU.

That's a really weird argument. You're saying that even though SMT doesn't help
single threaded workloads, if they hadn't implemented SMT then Intel would have
just shrugged their shoulders and given up on all ways of making cores go fast ??

Look, I think Intel has done a great job the last 5 or 6 years. But they've taken
a business decision to use a common core design across a lot of very different
workloads. It's at least plausible that some of the results are not perfect for
all possible uses.