Intel Core i7 Processors [models & pricing] ! !

[JumpingJack]

You failed to answer me why it didnt help the P4 against A64 single cores (before the X2's were finally released much later).

SMT is a threading technique, specifically simultaneous multithreading. This is not a novel or new concept, not even for Intel when they implemented in P4. Several microprocessor designs have utilized the concept to improve performance, the catch is that -- as the name implies -- it will only be useful for mulithreaded situations.

Games are hard to multithread, and back in the day, no game was multithreaded. Add to that that the P4 basic architecture was botched toward the end, gave the A64 a good lead. P4's really sucked at gaiming, though, because of the deep pipeline -- where branch mispredictions incurred high penalties by stalling the processor as much as 30 cycles or more and game code is very branchy.

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/...ance/page3.asp

Shortly after HT came on the scene, Intel worked with iD to produced a multithreaded patch for quake 4 ... in this case, it should be obvious that HT does indeed help -- but only in cases where the code is multithreaded.