Quote Originally Posted by Sintel View Post
Except that one does not rule out the other

If a virtual core gives a 10-15% performance improvement for a 5% increase in transistor budget, then that is damn good spending of transistors...

That's the thing, of course a real core is better, but you have to double transistor count / die size for that extra core... And if you have lot's of threads that sparsely use cores (server-type workloads), then HT makes much more sense than having lots of cores with not much to do. It just isn't efficient use of available hardware.

Don't forget, nehalem and deneb have more or less the same transistor count, but there are vast performance differences depending on workload..

One word. Cache. The core logic of Nehalem is about 40% larger than Shanghai. But Shanghai's cache makes up most of the difference in die size and transistor budget.