A DB that performs no IO? Can you elaborate?
>To test CPU performance, I used a read-only in-memory sysbench OLTP benchmark, as it burns CPU cycles and no IO is performed by Percona Server.
If you're latency bound by the round trip to main memory then SMT will still have a noticeable benefit. The most important thing it can't help with is if you are compute bound.
YMMV. SMT usually halves the cache size usable by each thread. If your memory access is heavily local, enabling SMT can hurt your performance.