Comment by PorciiVorbesc

> If contention between shared resources meant that the design was not able to achieve an ~8x speedup when run with eight parallel threads, that would mean the design was not scalable.

By that definition it definitely was not scalable.

>But we did in fact see a roughly 8x speedup with eight threads,

Care to share a source? Because AFAIR there definitely was no 8x linear speedup with 8 threads even in benchmarks, let alone in real world use cases. The only benchmarks where those 8 threads would scale best and beat Intel were archival compression/decompression and media encoding. At everything else Intel wiped the floor with it.

>The only time contention was a serious problem was with workloads that were dominated by floating point, which were relatively rare.

Many real-world compute workloads, especially gaming related, are floating point.