Thuban 1055T/1090T Previews, info and Reviews

[JumpingJack]

Not sure if I understand your point. (Or you - mine?)

Yes, It adds performance. There is dedicated hardware for HT within every i7 core that IS part of extra core. So it is not just 4 cores.
For example, here pure 4 cores in cinebench 11.5 have only 80% of performance compared to case with HT on.

I see your point, you are arguing Intel is the first on the market with a true 8 core on the desktop-- AMD ,and most anyone with an objective take on the technology, would disagree

My point is that it takes 6 amd cores to get to the performance of 4 intel cores, it's really that simple. HT is an architectural feature that enables one intel core to populate and keep the dispatch stations full, yielding more instructions retired per clock or more work done per unit time.

HT is not an extra core (though it is recognized as an extra core in the OS), it is a method of interleaving two distinct contextual threads through the pipeline that would otherwise not be populated -- HT extracts parallelism at the thread level in addition to the instruction level. Most processors (AMD/Intel/IBM power) that are superscalar OoO driven are actually very inefficient. Even with a 4 issue design, Intel cannot overcome the logistical latency inherent in branch misprediction, cache misses (long memory calls), and ambiguations, as such cores, even at 'full load' spend more time idle than they spend actually performing an execution. AMD is at the same disadvantage, the actual IPC of AMD cores never approach 3 just as the actual IPC of an Intel core never approaches 4.

The fact is Intel can push more work per core than AMD can, in order for AMD to reach this level of performance, they need 6 cores since each core produces less useful work than an Intel core.

This brings up the point mentioned above, Thuban will be ~ 350 mm^2, Nehalem is on the order of 260 mm^2 (quad core) both at 45 nm. It cost AMD more to get to this level of performance, it is that simple. That makes no difference to you and me, if AMD is willing to eat the margin and charge 300 bucks for a 6 core, so be it... cost to AMD is irrelevant to the end user.

Jack