I do as anyone who used a Northcut and Prescott. I am not talking about all of a sudden a bunch of SMT threads is going to make everything a millions times faster. Suggesting that, that is what I am thinking is frankly insulting. Over all computing power wins in a vacuum which is why the 8600k/9600k seems like such a better buy than a 2600x (though I would say that the 2600x fits a little bellow it in cost so there is a money saving option there). But people don't use their PC's in a vacuum.
So here is a question. Do you know how a CPU handles a new process that needs computer cycles? Do you know what SMT threads do? Do you really not understand why a fully tapped out CPU without SMT would see a significant drop in performance when the CPU needs to do something else for the system, where a CPU with SMT wouldn't. Which is my entire point. As it is with new cutting edge games of 2016 till now a 4c even 8t CPU is riding at 100% CPU usage. An 8T cpu can at least make room for other things without tanking a cores works in games while it is doing its doing other work. If and I'll give you an if rather than when, even if I think its a when and the when is pretty close, games start to try to send to the CPU more than 4 cores than just like with the the 7600 now. When you use it in a real machine, a computer that's sole job isn't to run one game and absolutely nothing else so windows never interferes, when anything happens in the back ground one or more cores are stolen for that job and cause frame rates to tank. This is why when Ryzen users talked of more fluid and stable performance back when it launched, something X79+ guys have known for years. It isn't the placebo that people played it off as.
You are basically just revealing that you don't really understand modern preemptive multi-tasking OS and multi-threaded code.
You just keep falling back to,
But HT/SMT is magic...
The most modern games are running dozens of threads. Single threads don't lock cores in modern OC/code. Every CPU core is running dozens of threads, and they get a time slice on a core. At any second, when busy, your system has HUNDREDS of threads in flight, my system currently near idle, and still has
over a thousand threads, though most a idle at any time.
It is nonsensical to think a couple of extra logical threads from HT/SMT on a CPU matters when you are time slicing hundreds of threads.
All that really matters, is the overall CPU power. HT/SMT matters, but it only matters in the degree that contributes to the overall CPU Power.
SMT/HT simply allows more efficient use CPU pipeline resources. Any given piece of code, typically can't use all the pipelines resources, SMT/HT enable higher usage of that pipeline, and thus improving performance. The benefit isn't one more logical thread, it's the full utilization, so another overall 25-30% performance. That extra performance matters much more than 1 more logical thread in the sea of hundreds of threads your CPU is time slicing.
You are overly fixated on CPU thread count like we were still in the era of
cooperative multitasking, when it is something nearly irrelevant in the modern context with hundreds of time sliced threads in flight in any given second.