[usrusr]

Yeah, I've been surprised that hyperthreading was still around for quite a while now. It's from an era when the goal was to squeeze as many instructions per time unit as possible through a given transistor count. Or perhaps more correctly, through a given chip area. But that's in the past, now the goal is achieving as many instructions as possible per watt. And if that requires a larger chip (or even better: more chiplets), so be it.

I think two cores that are 50% utilized burn through less power than one core that is 100% utilized but that also contains all the extra stuff it needs to pretend it's two cores. And that's the best case scenario. Quite possible that in the days HT was introduced, idle units weren't half as good at not consuming power as they are now.

[hypercube33]

It's just anecdotal but I really feel like Intel hyper threading helped their cores not pipeline stall more than anything so it may have helped the feel and benchmarks until their core count rose or their thread scheduler improved.