[JF-AMD]

The goal was not to dismiss SMT - merely to explain why we are not using it.

We have a different strategy than the competition. They are choosing SMT, we are heading down the path of more physical cores.

At the end of the day 3 things matter: what is the performance (throughput), what is the power consumption, and what is the price.

I am pretty confident we will do well in all 3.

The argument that we have been deflecting for some time is "SMT only adds ~5% overhead and gives you ~20% more performance." On the surface that sounds like a good tradeoff. If you always got 20% - but you don't.

Instead, for our Bulldozer product, we are using 16 cores. It will be in approximately the same power/thermal range of our current 4 and 6-core products. But 2 threads running on 2 physical cores will deliver 80% more throughput than 1 thread running on 1 core. When you compare that to the 20% uplift for SMT when you run 2 threads on 1 core, you start to see the benefit.