So in practice, this is only an issue if you regularly make use of all of the threads available. If you're not using all the threads available, there would be no perceived performance hit (despite what a multi threaded benchmark might show). The other thing that improves perceived performance is going to be how fast the individual threads are (single core performance). Both are obviously important, number of threads becomes really important when you don't have enough and all your cores are constantly pegged, single core performance is important when you have a task that's pegging a single thread and you want it to be faster (which is many of them, some computing tasks are very hard to paralellize)