Quote from: Damien on June 21, 2020, 05:58:28
Wait, so both CPU's have 8 threads and they tied, despite the AMD running slightly slower clocks and at lower TDP? The GPU performance is very good news tho. Hopefully it'll kick AMD's Radeon team into gear.
All threads are not made equal. Intel has only 4 cores with two-way SMT (each pair of threads shares resources of a single core). While AMD has 8 cores so the threads don't have to share. It's well known that SMT is inferior to full cores. A single core with two-way SMT (two threads per core) is nowhere near as powerful as two separate cores. How much benefit you get depends on the workload (and implementation). You can actually lose performance. In practical workloads, you're probably looking at +50 % at best. So, a 4C/8T CPU should roughly match 6C/6T CPU. At best. And it could get spanked by a 4C/4T CPU. At worst.
So, why would anyone do it? Adding SMT is much simpler than adding full cores. And it can improve performance. It can also be used quite creatively although I suspect that is more the case in research rather than practice. For example, Xeon Phi has four threads per core.