The Technical Director of AMD claims that the company has not expressed any intentions to implement support for four threads on a single 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. For instance, IBM has long offered server processors with support for that many threads per core.
In an interview with the website AMD's Technical Director Mark Papermaster responded to a question about the feasibility of implementing support for four threads per core in the desktop segment and began his comment with a statement about the absence of any official commitments at this time. Rumors attributed to AMD intentions to implement SMT4 support in the Milan server processors with Zen 3 architecture, but later published official presentations refuted this information.
Mark Papermaster tried to discuss SMT4 as abstractly as possible, emphasizing his unwillingness to associate this idea with the company's existing plans. On these terms, he assessed this feature of processors quite objectively. According to him, some users in the desktop segment even disable core multithreading. Some applications benefit from using this feature, while others do not. The concept of processing four threads with one core is not new; it has been applied in the server segment for a long time. Mark even referenced the existence of hardware solutions supporting SMT4, subtly hinting at IBM Power processors, which acquired this capability early in this decade. Essentially, as Mark states, the justification for implementing SMT4 is determined solely by the presence of a critical mass of applications that can work effectively with it in a specific market segment.
Source: 3dnews.ru
