From the interview. Interesting.
"George Cozma: You know, for a single thread of it, let’s say you’re running a workload that only uses one thread on a given core. Can a single thread take advantage of all of the front-end resources and can it take advantage of both decode clusters and the entirety of the dual ported OP cache?
Mike Clark: The answer is yes, and it’s a great question to ask because I explain SMT to a lot of people, they come in with the notion that we don’t [and] they aren’t able to use all these resources when we’re in single threaded mode, but our design philosophy is that barring a few, very rare microarchitectural exceptions, everything that matters is available in one thread mode. If we imagine we are removing [SMT] it’s not like we’d go shrink anything. There’s nothing to shrink. This is what we need for good, strong single threaded performance. And we’ve already built that."