AMD's technical director claims that the company has not expressed any intentions to implement support for four threads per core in future processors. The idea of SMT4 is not so premature — much in this area depends on the availability of software capable of leveraging the advantages of multithreading in this format. IBM, for example, has long offered server processors with support for this number of threads per core.
In an interview with the site AMD's technical director Mark Papermaster responded to a question regarding the possibility of implementing support for four threads per core in the desktop segment and began his comments by stating that there are currently no official commitments. Rumors attributed to AMD intentions to implement SMT4 support in the Milan server processors with Zen 3 architecture, but later published official presentations contradicted this information.
Mark Papermaster tried to discuss the topic of SMT4 as abstractly as possible, emphasizing his unwillingness to associate this idea with the company's existing plans. On these grounds, he evaluated this processor feature rather objectively. According to him, some users in the desktop segment even disable multithreading on cores. Some applications benefit from using such a feature, while others do not. The concept of processing four threads by one core is not new; it has long been applied in the server segment. Mark even referred to the existence of hardware solutions supporting SMT4, subtly hinting at IBM Power processors, which gained this capability back in the early part of this decade. Essentially, as Mark states, the justification for implementing SMT4 is determined only by the existence of a critical mass of applications that can effectively work with it in a particular market segment.
Kilde: 3dnews.ru
