I am not a Hardware Specialist, and the term core "confuses" me. The sales people know all the terms. As I understand it, regarding Power7, The Power7 chip (physical packaging) has two something (cores?) that each has 8 processors (what AIX calls procXX) and each of these processors has 4-way SMT - that AIX sees as a "logical" cpu.
My main "difficulity" is comparing statistics between Power5 and Power6 "cpu" stats, and Power7 cpu stats, because the efficiency of the new processor makes it "impossible" for a single thread to utilize the potential 100%. To reach 100% efficiency you need at least two threads active. Lastly, the new algorithm makes the CPU stats reported by vmstat, topas, sar, iostat, etc more in line with the way other hardware processors are reporting their stats. I hope to have this worked into a simple demo someday, but need a system to play on before I can do enough testing to get that done clearly.
In short, the term "core" confuses me. Ask someone from sales how IBM relates it's processors to, for example, Intel processors and the definition/meaning of core.