moinmoin
Diamond Member
- Jun 1, 2017
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You may not believe it, but AMD only introduced SMT2 with Zen two years ago, and that already was more efficient (and also more secure) than Intel's HT which means there were already enough shareable resources. Zen 2 increased that once more, and @looncraz noted that its width is comparable to Power 7 which does SMT4. We are in the speculation thread for Ryzen 4k (and I'm expecting it to use Zen 3) so we talk about which low hanging fruits there are for AMD to pick for the next round. To me evidence points to SMT4 possibly being one of those low hanging fruits.AMD/Intel/IMB already have SMT, there are no questions about it being useful. But they don't have SMT64 even if that would help in some artificial corner case. So there are certainly variuos design time and production/performance costs attached to SMT implementation, even if they are not "magic". Is AMD Ryzen as wide as Power9? Not really.
Whether SMT4 then is actually pushed or disabled on the mainstream desktop is a whole different discussion. Feel free to propose some other low hanging fruits you expect to be picked then, I'm all ear (and think we had too few of them so far to be on page 5 already).