15 & 17" MBPs- Hyperthreading versus real cores?

[Gata]

Assuming all cores are maxed out, how would the performance of the virtual cores stack up against physical cores (say, in the instance of a i7-620m)?

 

[Eddyisgreat]

All other variables held constant, physical cores will always beat out a system with half the physical cores + hyperthreading, particularly if you are running processes that actually max out the cores.

 

[amarcus]

Hyper-threading at its best gives about a 15-20% performance increase. It's more about better utilising the cores you have rather than adding additional compute power. In short a hyper-threaded i7-620m is more of souped up dual core and wouldn't be able to touch a true quad-core equivalent.