One of the biggest mistakes users have is a mental model of SMT that imagines the existence of one "real core" and one inferior one. The threads are coequal in all observable respects.
I suspect that’s a result of the performance. While both threads are capable of the same tasks, you don’t get the 2x performance you would with a “real” second thread, really a second core.
So conceptually it’s a little more like having 1.25 single threaded cores, or whatever the ratio is for your application, if you only care about performance in the end.
If you're compressing a video or a similar highly optimised compute-hungry task, your computer's fans are roaring like jet engines, and task manager says you're at 50% CPU utilisation - I can see how people formed that opinion.
I mean, Intel's new CPUs certainly have both real cores ("P-cores") and inferior cores ("E-cores"). I suspect the reason they introduced E-cores is primarily thermal- and die-space-related, not actually power usage or performance. I always make sure to buy the chips without E-cores because they are better.
That's weird, I buy the one with the most e-cores. They're great for batch processes. For example the 14900K builds the Linux kernel faster than the Ryzen 9 7950X, even though it only has 8 "real cores" versus 16.
