AMD Tapes Out First "Bulldozer" Microprocessors.

[Dresdenboy]

The advantage of SMT is that it doesn't need a lot of extra chip area. While an extra core will take a lot of chip area.

This has been discussed before. Both the AMD engineers asked by John and Andy Glew said, that the additional cluster (now core) adds about 12.5% to the core itself. If you look at todays chips, in most cases the cores take less than one half of the area. Thus the increased chip size amounts to ~5%. It's not the same type of core you have in mind. It's just a bunch of duplicated execution resources (scheduler, ROB, registers etc), and one additional 16k L1 cache.