Hyperthreading

[tontod]

Anyone heard about the new hyperthreading technology by Intel lately? I'm sure pm has.

hyperthreading


It mentions using unused portions of the cpu. Why have there been unused portions of the cpu? It sounds a little simplistic. Anyone havea better handle on this?

edit: nm, didnt see the post below

 

[BurntKooshie]

Look a few posts down

 

[Rand]

In basic terms 'Hyperthreading' formerly known as "Jackson" technology effectively allows a single processor to execute instructions from multiple threads. Whereas normally, you would need multiple processors to execute multiple threads at once.
A single processor with Hyperthreading technology will be seen as two logical processors by the operating system and applications.

Naturally, an application would still have to be specifically coded for multithreading to be able to take advantage of both logical processors.

Intel Developer page has some Whitepaper's on Hyperthreading here.

It is set to debute in the Northwood based Xeon core, and expected to scale down to inclusion in the regular Pentium 4 sometime in the future.