The "shared" components being the integer units, which are typically assembled with cores in a 1:1 ratio. So by having two cores with one integer unit you technically still don't have a hyper-threaded CPU. AMD argued in court at the time that this counted as 2 separate cores, while some lawsuits claimed that statement was false advertising.
I opted out of that lawsuit in writing stating my opinion that a judgement against AMD in this case would have a chilling consequence on future architectural developments. AMD eventually settled for $12.1m.
Yeah, sharing FPU makes a lot more sense than sharing integer unit. FPU, particularly on home user applications, is not used nearly as heavily as integer. But AFAICT the CPU used in the article was one of these Bulldozer-based designs with shared FPUs. And it didn't sound like they did anything with trying to pin processes to specific cores to avoid 2 threads sharing the same FPU. The description of their code doesn't sound like it would be floating-point heavy but its hard to say for sure.
I opted out of that lawsuit in writing stating my opinion that a judgement against AMD in this case would have a chilling consequence on future architectural developments. AMD eventually settled for $12.1m.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14804/amd-settlement