IdiotInCharge
NVIDIA SHILL
- Joined
- Jun 13, 2003
- Messages
- 14,675
The fact is there is no pressing need for 4 way smt any time soon except in the enterprise. When the need for it exists then and only then will it become a part of consumer cpus.
See below:
Actually there is a case in point where SMT 4+ is useful for consumers. Especially once MS figures out how to address busy threads to physical cores over SMT or Hyperthreaded virtual cores.
That is the lower powered desktop systems or even laptops. Why put a octocore processor in a laptop if you can just a 4 core with smt 4. You get 16 threads to work with. All of your background tasks get assigned to those and your gaming or more intensive productivity apps get distributed to your physical cores.
Exactly. Much of the work done by most consumer systems is in no way 'heavy'. Even most games aren't, when you're looking at stuff like MOBAs and Overwatch and so on.
In reality, one could get away with dual-core CPUs again; you'd have eight threads, and hopefully most 'work' would be outsourced to the GPU cores if not handled by SIMD units like SSE and AVX, so those 'SMT cores' would mostly either be running through branching logic or shuttling commands for other subsystems around.