[adrian_b]

I was surprised that disabling SMT has improved by a few percents the Geekbench 6 multi-threaded results on a Zen 3 (5900X) CPU.

While there are also other tasks where SMT does not bring advantages, for the compilation of a big software project SMT does bring an obvious performance improvement, of about 20% for the same Zen 3 CPU.

In any case, Intel has said that they have designed 2 versions of the Lion Cove core, one without SMT for laptop/desktop hybrid CPUs and one with SMT for server CPUs with P cores (i.e. for the successor of Granite Rapids, which will be launched later this year, using P-cores similar to those of Meteor Lake).

[papichulo2023]

Probably because the benchmark is not using all cores so the cores hit the cache more often.