So discourage anyone from upgrading their PC and donating much more computer time....afterall a very slow P3 running 24/7 will get one as fast as a multi-core and be very much cheaper....the fact that the project suffers and what would take a few month to complete now takes a few years does not matter of course!

If I say "some people take badges too seriously", will I get lynched?

:-o

The days are calculated with the basis of CPU power in mind. If WCG will take your CPU (lets say a Pentium4) as basis for this calulation it will be like that:

If my CPU makes in total 10 GigaFlops and your CPU is making only 1 GigaFlop, then I will be rewarded 10 times more days then you in the same amount of time you calculated 1 day. Hence I will have the 90 Days required for a Gold badge in 9 days. Makes perfect sense.
It is all about power. If I have a CPU with 100 Gigaflop be it a 16 core or 1 core, I will get 100 days for 1 day of yours. If you wand to put the basis higher than 1 Giogaflop, be my guest: I will still get 10 times faster there than you. The answer is buy a better computer. There is no mathematical formula to equalize more power with less.

It's wrong Lawrence.
It is correct that the global throughput (and real work done) is improved by only 25-30 %, but the CPU time reported is strictly double, i.e. 2 days/day on a P4HT and 8 days/day on an i7.
CPU time reporting is very awkward: if other work in your PC makes a 1-hour WU run in 2 hours it will report 2 hours of runtime, whether HT or not.

I have checked that several times under Windows. Some things I have noticed make me wonder if it is the same under Linux. One of these days I will "upgrade" my P4HT to dual boot and do a new set of tests on HT under Linux.

Cheers. Jean.

I don't know if it is feasible thing but wonder if I could implement HT in a Intel Quad processor that wasn't manufactured with HT included...