
The main reason to get a processor with more cores or threads today is for purposes like live-streaming your gameplay or rendering video. Very few modern games can meaningfully utilize more than that, though as time goes on, that will likely change. In gaming terms, you generally don’t need any more than 4 strong cores for acceptable gaming performance. This usually happens without any meaningful loss in performance, and so it effectively doubles the processor’s power… at least when used in applications optimized to utilize multiple threads. With SMT (called Hyperthreading (HT) by Intel) enabled, there can now be two virtual threads per physical core.

With the debut of SMT (Simultaneous Multithreading) technology, however, a distinction arose. In the past, threads and cores were completely 1:1 in any given system, so the distinction between the two didn’t matter much.


A thread is essentially a virtual core, or how the operating system sees your physical core.
