SMT Performance Benchmarks Continue To Show Benefit With AMD Zen 5/5C

While Intel's upcoming Core Ultra Series 2 "Lunar Lake" laptop processors are doing away with Hyper Threading (HT) and instead focusing more on additional E cores. AMD has asserted Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) is still beneficial and supported across both their Zen 5 and Zen 5C cores. For those curious about the SMT performance and power efficiency impact, here are some SMT on/off comparison benchmarks using the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 "Strix Point" laptop processor.

Back during the AMD Tech Day in Los Angeles, AMD engineers reaffirmed their commitment to SMT even while Intel is disregarding SMT/HT with Lunar Lake. AMD feels the small die costs due to SMT is justified with the performance/efficiency it can deliver for AMD's architecture. With AMD SMT there are also less security headaches to deal with than Intel's plagued Hyper Threading from security concerns in recent years. I've shown in the past how SMT can still yield nice wins for AMD EPYC Bergamo but now in the Zen 5 era I was curious to see the SMT power/performance benefits on the laptop side with AMD Strix Point since it will be competing with Intel Lunar Lake.

Today's article is quite straight forward and is looking at the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 performance on the ASUS Zenbook S 16 at its defaults and then repeating the tests after setting the "nosmt" kernel parameter and rebooting to disable Simultaneous Multi-Threading. No other changes were made besides this default vs. "nosmt" difference. During the benchmarking the CPU thermals and SoC package power consumption were monitored as well for seeing the impact from SMT. From there a variety of multi-threaded Linux workloads were explored on this AMD Ryzen AI 300 series laptop.