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Hyper Threading Question (What is it and do you need it?

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Supreme [H]ardness
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I noticed that most of the old PIV's (Socket 478) had HT. I just want to know what it for and why the new dual core CPU's (Core 2 Duo) Don't have HT
 
HT was simulated dual core.


Basically, it was intel way of handling multiple processing threads [thus the name] at one time, which is irrelevant now that there is actually multiple core as opposed to one huge core that needs to pretend it's several cores.
 
In principle it's a good idea - if there are logic units on the CPU that aren't in use, then they can be used by a different program. Sometimes it can be a pain though; whereas in a dual-core or quad-core all the cores are equivalent, the HT virtual cores' power varies depending on what's going on on the physical cores, and sometimes this means that load is allocated inappropriately.
 
Imagine a quad-core WITH HT. If they rework the load balencing they will have a BEAST :eek:
 
naw...you'd burn through all your cache too fast.

the new 12MB cache chips could take it, I think...but the 4MB and 8MB ones would implode....plus you might run into limitations with how many of them certain versions of windows would address [Home Premium, for instance, might only acknowledge 4 of em]
 
Well, when you had 1 core, and simulated 2 cores, the benefits were never anything to write home about. Only Benchmarkers would see anything, rarely any measurable real world advantage. That's why they decided to drop it when they went to multi core chips.

Since you already have 2 and 4 real core chips, I can't see where having 8 virtual cores will gain you anything. I think it's just a E-penis thing from Intel.

Don
 
HT actually did give smoother multi-tasking back in the single core days, definitely a real world advantage. I had written about it a few times before. An example of a common thing I would do back then was encode a video and browse the web at the same time. On my single core A64, web browsing performance was horrible while encoding in the background. On a P4 w/HT, web browsing was actually usable with a heavy background task like encoding.

Multi-threaded performance increases were nothing to write home about though. I think some sites pegged the increase at about 15% for a task that could be run as either one or two threads.
 
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