If your workload is already well parallelized, then, yes 20% is quite significant. However, working to parallelize properly over 8 rather than 4 has its own costs.
The thing that bothers me most is that 800% CPU and 500% CPU on this processor are roughly equivalent at 5x100%CPU, it makes everything very hard to reason about when planning capacity.
If I had a nickel for every time I had to explain why "You are at 50% CPU now, but you can't actually run twice as many processes on this machine and get the same runtime", I'd be able to buy a large frapuccino or two at starbucks.
Perhaps I'm uninformed though - is there a tool like htop, which would give me an idea of how close am I to maxing out a CPU?
As far as silicon/power it is nice, but IIRC (I am not involved in purchasing anymore) it used to cost over 50% in USD for those 20% in performance when you non-HT parts were common.
It (used to be) my job. Does "because people fall for deceptive marketing, waste money, and then waste my time trying to salvage their reputation" sound better?
What application?
And that's an improvement - some 15 years ago, with similar computational loads, most of my tests ran 10-20% faster with the HT off (using 2 core / 2 threads) than with HT on (using 2 core / 4 threads) - there just wasn't enough cache to support those many threads.