Intel previews hyper-threading

[Rob9874]

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,95044,00.asp

"To demonstrate the technology, Otellini and an assistant used Microsoft's Moviemaker to encode a home movie clip, running it on two 3-GHz PCs, one with Hyper-Threading and one without. The test showed a 20 percent performance improvement, according to Otelleni. That may not be much time on a short video clip, but it's a savings of about 15 minutes on a two-hour video, noted the assistant.

In the second demonstration, both machines attempted to encode data while playing full-screen video. The standard 3-GHz PC stumbled, producing jerky video and sound, while the Hyper-Threading PC completed the job smoothly."

 

[BFG10K]

I've always liked hyperthreading and I feel that Intel should have started using as soon as the Pentium4 was released because it would have made more favourable benchmark results against AMD processors.

 

[MadRat]

Its the ability to do two heavy tasks at once that appeals, not necessarily the limited performance boost. I don't foresee huge performance gains going with SMT, but the consumer will be able to feel the difference.

 

[EdipisReks]

hopefully prescott will have hyper threading enabled. i wish there was a way to enable it on current CPU's. the hardware is on the die, afterall.

--jacob

 

[Dewey]

I have a Dell Precision 530 with 2 P4's. I have enabled SMT. My observations and personal measurements show a measurable performance gain on threaded applications or tasks that can be run on multiple CPUs. I believe SMT is slightly slower for single threaded apps. The way I have been looking at it is that SMT turns my 2 2.2GHz processors into 4 1.4GHz processors. OK, its a very crude analogy but that seems to sum it up IME.

 

[sharkeeper]

I wonder how many computers that will be able to do this in hardware will get shipped with Windows XP Home edition?

Even Pro only supports 2 CPU's so a dual HT system wouldn't work? The OS would need to address 4 cpu's to do this so you would need 2000 Server!

Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

Cheers!

 

[ilkhan_v4]

You're almost right. Windows XP Pro recognizes the difference between logical and physical processors, so if you have two Hyperthreaded processors, it will recognize them as 4. If you have 4 real processors, it will only recognize two. I assume WinXP Home will only recognize one physical and two logical processors. Windows 2000 only recognizes two no matter what.