Regarding your conclusion, I always figured that the reason WAITPKG seems kinda lame is the only reason they ported it to Core architectures was to make the het

Regarding your conclusion, I always figured that the reason WAITPKG seems kinda lame is the only reason they ported it to Core architectures was to make the heterogenous CPUs possible. It works better on Atom. On Core it does almost nothing, as you note. AMD's ISA extension was written from the ground up for their high performance server core, which might explain why it's actually useful.