One of the major differences between Intel and AMD is hyper-threading. All cores in AMD CPUs are true cores, whereas all Intel CPUs have hyper-threading, which creates two virtual cores per physical core. Another question that is asked far too often is whether to enable or disable hyper-threading. From hundreds of reports and testing, it appears that it is better to leave it on for newer Intel servers. The fear of performance degradation due to hyper-threading is no longer valid, as it has gone through decades of development and all the initial issues have been resolved. It is also best to not count all hyper-threading cores as real cores, since they are still virtual. When counting the number of total cores available in a node, take a conservative approach and count slightly fewer than the total cores.