Jon Masters (jcm.delete@this.jonmasters.org) on November 18, 2020 11:31 pm wrote:
> Maynard Handley (name99.delete@this.name99.org) on November 18, 2020 4:46 pm wrote:
>
> > There is a right way and a wrong way of doing things. The wrong way, in this case, is treating
> > SMT as a fake core, rather than something like a "co-routine acceleration engine".
>
> Yes, exposing it as a fake core for marketing reasons
>

No. It's not empty marketing.

>
> was always a poor choice. It had the benefit of quickly
> being enabled by software (that then had to be educated about it to not actively hurt performance) but this
> went on far too long. When the cloud happened, folks handed out vCPUs (aka 1.3 cores per 2 "core" VM) and
> the number of people using the cloud who actually even know these are often HT threads within a shared single
> core is probably a very shockingly small number. In that respect, I actually thought the SMT side-channels
> in 2018/19 that drew attention to this were net positive for the overall industry.
>
> Jon.
>