Stop bashing HT! HT is a technology which was being used in servers far before it came to desktops and currently only Intel offers it. My experience with HT has been marvellous! I have 3 machines:
1. P4 2.8GHz HT 800MHz FSB Northwood
2. P3 450MHz 133MHz FSB
3. Pentium-m 1.6GHz centrino
The top performer as expected is my HT machine. It is extremely responsive while running multiple applications. I always run it in the Linux environment which is designed for server class hardware and so it takes the advantage of my HT while WinXP which is optimized for a P3s ( yes that sucks ) doesnt. I recently installed Windows Server 2003 and the difference between the performance of WinXP and Win server is tremendous. XP takes about 30 seconds to boot up while Win 2k3 takes up only about 10 seconds. Also, after logging in the system is fully ready unlike WinXP which takes sometime to become fully responsive. Linux is even more responsive. Imagine running all kinds of daemons, burning cds, indexing your harddrive, playing mp3s and it all shows up hardly on the CPU usage meter. So HT is no gimmick. It's for real.
While comparing to AMD64, HT does have an advantage. But if you were to run optimized apps for AMD64 then it would even out the competition.
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