SMT Performance Benchmarks Continue To Show Benefit With AMD Zen 5/5C
Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) still proved very much useful for AMD Strix Point with the new Zen 5/5C cores. Contrary to Intel abandoning Hyper Threading (HT/SMT) with Lunar Lake, SMT was providing measurable performance gains across a wide mix of multi-threaded workloads. The impact of SMT varied but when taking the geometric mean of 57 benchmarks in full, SMT on the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 was around 1.18x the performance of running this 12-core Zen 5/5C laptop SoC with SMT disabled.
Equally important is that leaving SMT enabled on this AMD Ryzen AI 300 series laptop did not negatively impact the CPU power consumption. Overall the CPU package power consumption averaged out to being the same across both runs.
Similarly, the CPU SoC temperature was effectively unchanged with/without SMT on this AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 laptop.
I'll run similar tests on AMD Ryzen 9000 and EPYC Turin when the time comes, but simply put SMT is still looking very much worthwhile for AMD's latest Zen 5 processors.
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