alt Hacker NewsNo, AMD's FX "fake" 8-core was more than just 4-cores + hyperthreading. In SMT(hyperthreading) the execution engines, ALUs, FPUs, and caches are completely shared, whereas on FX design, they built two completely separate integer pipelines (schedulers, register files, ALUs, and L1 data caches) inside one module. Only the instruction fetch/decode front-end, the FPU, and the L2 cache were shared. So the FX design would be an in-between a 4-core + SMT and a true 8-core.
Fair, I had not delved into the details, but still they were not full cores and the marketing did not make a real distinction.
I had a pilledriver one, it was a perfectly good cpu, I would buy it again. If I remember back then it was the best overall performance per dollar, the alternatives if I remember correctly were i7-39.. and i7-38.. and were at best 50% more expensive for 10-15% more performance.