Bulldozers first screens

[keithlm]

No...
Module is just a term to explain how AMD shares parts between physical cores.
One module has TWO physical cores...HyperThreaded threads have nothing to do with TWO PHYSICAL CORES

Of course AMD can price an 8 core to SB's 4/8...but wombat wasnt talking about competing, he was stating that basically thats what AMD's modules are.

It's almost like buying a pack of batteries in twos instead of buying individual packs of batteries with just one battery inside...you save some space the packaging takes up. That's all a module does.

8 cores, 8 threads. There is no option to turn "HT" off, and single threaded workloads are not going to skyrocket in performance like they would if you were running 4 threads on a 4/8 SB chip rather than 8.

For example if you ran 4 threads of HyperPi on Bulldozer vs 8 for the most part all threads 4 or 8 will perform equally. If you ran 4 threads of HyperPi on SB it would be significantly faster than if you ran 8 threads of HyperPi.

Actually the ONLY thing that needs to be considered when wondering if a module is analogous to a hyperthreaded core is the intentions of the architects for both companies.

If they were creating their design for basically the same purpose then the designs are exactly analogous.

The questions of whether one design is more elegant or performs better or costs more are actually secondary. (And your last example means absolutely nothing; although is does display the reason Hyperthreading is not an optimal solution.)