The benefit of SMT in the multi-core era
Stijn Eyerman, Lieven Eeckhout · 2014
The number of active threads in a multi-core processor varies over time and is often much smaller than the number of supported hardware threads. This requires multi-core chip designs to balance core count and per-core performance. Low active thread counts benefit from a few big, high-performance cores, while high active thread counts benefit more from a sea of small, energy-efficient cores.