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Are there situations in which SMT negatively impacts performance? What if we have two software threads from two separate applications, each of which has a high ratio of memory loads/stores to arithmetic. And suppose the kernel schedules these two threads to run on the two hardware threads of the same processor. Then we don't get much latency-hiding advantage (since arithmetic operations are infrequent), and additionally each thread is filling the cache with its data, leaving less cache room for the other application's data. Is the worst-case scenario for SMT something like this?

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