RichardC (tich.delete@this.pobox.com) on May 14, 2013 1:43 pm wrote:
>
> 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.

Yes, you can't make something that is perfect for everything. Nobody is disagreeing with that.

The thing we're disagreeing with you is on your separation of "client" vs "server" uses.

We've given you a lot of examples of common use cases for multi-core and SMT on client computers.
The argument is that, because of these users, in a weird world where SMT was not available, Intel might have gone for more thinner cores (like AMD).

We can also give you examples for single thread performance on servers. All in all, Amdhal's law applies and in many tasks lots of slow cores can't keep up with a few fast ones.