><OT>
>Hyperthreading is actually an excellent architectural feature that
>can give significant performance gains when implemented well and used
>for an appropriate workload under a decently HT aware OS.
>
>IMO, typical RDBMS streams are not an obviously appropriate workload,
>Intel didn't implement it particularly well and I don't think there
>are any OSes that support it particularly well.
></OT>
>
>But don't write off using it in the future, when it's been improved
>at both the OS and the silicon levels.
>
>
>
You are quite right of course - unfortunately the current Intel
implementation meets nearly none of these criteria! As Rod Taylor
pointed out off-list, IBM's SMT implementation on the Power5 is vastly
superior. Though he's also just told me that Sun is beating IBM on
price/performance for his workload, so who knows how reliable a chap he
is... ;-)
M