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What is SMT (also known as hyperthreading)?

Simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) allows a CPU core to run more than one software thread at the same time. These “hardware threads” a.k.a. “virtual cores” share almost all resources. The purpose of this feature is to make better use of the execution units within the core. It is rather hard to predict the benefit of SMT for real applications, so the best strategy is to try it using a well-designed, realistic benchmark case.