Intel combats [the expense of one thread per core] with Hyper-Threading, which allows each physical core to work on two threads. Over-provisioning is assumed, meaning you rely on under-utilization to extract additional performance from each core. This is a relatively inexpensive technology. But it’s also quite limited in the benefits it offers. Some workloads don’t see any speed-up from Hyper-Threading. Others barely crack double-digit performance gains.

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AMD is trying to define a third approach to threading it calls Two Strong Threads. Whereas Hyper-Threading only duplicates architectural states, the Bulldozer design shares the front-end (fetch/decode) and back-end of the core (through a shared L2 cache), but duplicates integer schedulers and execution pipelines, offering dedicated hardware to each of two threads.