Quote Originally Posted by informal View Post
The only problem with the SMT analogy is that in intel's case you have the same number of execution units being shared with 2x the thread count. In AMD's case you have a dedicated hardware part in the silicon that takes care of each thread. So your "3C 6T CMT" chip in reality does have 6 integer cores and 6 FMAC units. None of those are shared between 2 threads(yes I said 6 FMAC units ,not 3 FlexFP units,there is a difference). So to sum it up : in AMD's case each thread has a dedicated hardware(int and fp) in the chip which is equal to a core(more or less,who cares if the scaling is 1.8x) while in intel's case each core is shared among the 2 (weak) threads.
Now that the difference is clearly defined,it really doesn't matter much for AMD if they have dedicated HW that runs the thread IF it does it at sub par performance to their previous design (Thuban). It will be regarded as subpar,to even K10,let alone SB or Nehalem.
That's all that really matters, the performance. If BD is not even faster than Thuban, then AMD is going to lose many life long customers to Intel, myself included. At this point in time, it's not looking to rosy for BD.