Quote:
Originally Posted by lemonadesoda
Oh dear, that's quite an inaccurate slander. Should get him into trouble. Perhaps HT only made 10-15% performance difference on P4/Northwood architecture, but on Nehalem it gives 20-50% performance boost on multithreaded apps. Unless of course you cherry pick your benchmarks to show the worst data  ... |
It's obvious that logical cores can't compete with physical ones but what's undeniable is that they do boost the processor's power.
An 8 physical core AMD would (should?) kick the living hell out of any (current) I7 but AMD isn't there yet, nor is Intel for that matter.
Many claim that Phenom IIs aren't meant to be competing with I7s and should be competing with Yorkfields instead but i disagree: It's not Intel's fault AMD hasn't been able to make a closer (or better) performer to it's I7 and Intel's top CPUs should be competing with AMD's top CPUs.
This is no cause for AMD to give up: quite the contrary. Intel may have thought they were miles ahead of AMD but AMD have responded well, though not as good as they might have liked, but they did closed the gap quite a bit, IMHO.
In these CPU wars, one manufacturer must NOT get too far away from the other or it will be us consumers that will pay the price, literally.