[rumanator]

> So it's not "just benchmarks", people actually want to do stuff with it

IIRC when bulldozer was released and Intel's propaganda machine started spewing stories about how AMD core count was fake because two cores shared a FP unit, there was a flurry of scientific papers on the subject.

IIRC, it was determined that even the hot path of FP-intensive code only executed a single FP ops for each 7 non-FP operations. To put it differently, between each FP op all code has to execute ops to move data around.

Consequently, bulldozer's FP benchmarks scaled linearly wrt cores because even when multiple cores had to share a FP unit to run FP operations, they were so relatively scarce even in number-crunching applications that cores didn't blocked, thus overall performance was not affected.

That's the relevance of FP in real-world benchmarks.