Those weird Xeon Phi accelerators had 4 threads per core, and IIRC needed at least 2 running to get full performance. They were sort of niche, though.

I guess in general parallelism inside a core will either be extracted by the computer automatically with instruction-level-parallelism, or the programmer can tell it about independent tasks, using hyperthreads. So the hyperthread implementations are optimistic about how much progrmmers care about performance, haha.

Sort of niche indeed.

In addition to needing SMT to get full performance, there were a lot of other small details you needed to get right on Xeon Phi to get close to the advertised performance. Think of AVX512 and the HBM.

For practical applications, it never really delivered.