> Number of SMs is a more appropriate equivalent to CPU core count.
What do you mean by this? Why should an SM be considered equivalent to a CPU core? An SM can do 128 simultaneous adds and/or multiplies in a single cycle, where a CPU core can do, what, 2 or maybe 4? Obviously depends on the CPU / core / hyperthreading / # math pipelines / etc., but the SM to CPU-core ratio of the number of simultaneous calculation is in the double digits. It’s a tradeoff where the GPU has some restrictions in return for being able to do many multiples more at the same time.
If you consider an SM and a CPU equivalent, then the SM’s perf can exceed the CPU core by ~2 orders of magnitude — is that the comparison you want? If you consider a GPU thread lane and a CPU thread lane equivalent, the the GPU thread lane is slower and more restricted. Neither comparison is apples to apples, CPUs and GPUs are made for different workloads, but arguing that an SM is equivalent to a CPU core seems equally or more “misleading” when you’re leaving out the tradeoff.
I’d argue that comparing SMs to cores is misleading and that it makes more sense to compare chips is by their thread counts. Or, don’t compare cores at all and just look at the performance in, say, FLOPS.