AMD&#x27;s new Zen architecture implements SMT, similar to Intel&#x27;s hyperthreading.<p>The contention about core count on the Bulldozer architecture seems spurious to me. At the time Bulldozer was being developed, multi-core systems were just being introduced to the consumer market. It was unclear what sort of architecture would be most performant. AMD made a (bad only in hindsight) bet that Bulldozer would be a viable architecture for general purpose compute loads. It turns out that combining 1 FPU with two integer pipelines is not as effective as an SMT architecture.<p>At the time Bulldozer was developed and released, what exactly constituted a core was still not precisely defined. It turns out that Intel&#x27;s SMT architecture is much more effective, and thanks to market- and mind-share, people associate the definition of a core with Intel&#x27;s specific implementation.<p>AMD&#x27;s new development is on an SMT architecture known as Zen. Like all AMD news and marketing, it sounds exciting. Hopefully they execute well and it actually turns out to be exciting.