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>that is 32 logical cores at 3.0 GHz

Just having 32 logical cores doesn't mean much for performance. Hyperthreading is not magical, dual quad core cpus is still 8 cores, with potentially some minor performance gains from the hyperthreading depending on the application.

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In my experience with HPC (i.e. 100% load on all cores), enabling Hyperthreading gives you higher job throughput at the cost of increasing the time to complete a single job. The throughput improvement is around 5-30% depending on the applications being run. The average I've seen is around 20.

In high-load but I/O bound tasks Hyperthreading (Intel market speak for SMT) is magic. If something is compute bound, you are correct and the benefit is often slim, but typically not for application or database servers.

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