As a follow-up to the article earlier this month of the Intel Xeon 600 workstation performance against AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series in over 400 benchmarks -- including when carried out at the same core count and memory configuration -- today's article is exploring the Hyper Threading / SMT impact on both the Intel Redwood Cove and AMD Zen 5 cores for workstations.

This article is the last of the benchmarks conducted while the HP Z4 G6i workstation with the Intel Xeon 678X "Granite Rapids WS" was in the Phoronix lab for review and benchmarking.

The benchmarks today are for the Xeon 678X in its default configuration of 48 cores / 96 threads and then repeated when Hyper Threading (HT) was disabled for just 48 cores/threads. On the AMD Zen 5 side was the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9980X within the System76 Thelio Major workstation. The Threadripper 9980X was tested in its default 64 core / 128 thread configuration with SMT on and then off. Additionally, the 9980X was tested at 48 cores (6 cores per CCD enabled from BIOS) to match the core/thread count of the Xeon 678X.

From there a range of different SMT/HT relevant workloads were carried out for comparing the impact of Simultaneous Multi-Threading between these AMD and Intel workstation processors. The CPU power consumption and thermals were also monitored for reference. Fedora Workstation 44 was used for these SMT benchmarks while on the Linux 7.1 kernel and GCC 16.2 compiler.