Is HyperThreading / SMT a flawed concept?

Question

The primary idea behind HT/SMT was that when one thread stalls, another thread on the same core can co-opt the rest of that core\'s idle time and run with it, transparently.

Answer 1

After using the 8 core Atoms with virtualization, I salivate over the prospect of such a chip with HT. I will agree for most workloads maybe not, but with ESXi? You get truly impressive use of HT. The low power consumption just seals the deal on them for me. If you could get 16 logical cores on ESXi the price / performance would be truly through the roof. I mean, no way to afford the current Intel chips with 8 cores and HT and because of the way Vsphere and products for Vsphere are licensed per proc, dual proc hosts just don't make sense anymore cost wise for true small businesses.