To Hyperthread or not to Hyperthread, that is the question.

[limitedaccess]

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Prod...49.50.51.52.53.54.55.56.57.60.61.62.63.64.129

If you were to adjust for the 100mhz base difference, and 100mhz turbo core difference, what would the real difference between the two chips be?

Im guessing just about zilch, in all but a very few encoding and math programs

There is a difference in rendering performance as well. And certain 2d graphics works.

My only question is strictly related to multitasking and VMs. I wish reviews would start covering this due to the increasing usage in this area especially with multi monitor setups, more ram, more cores/threaded procs, more background applications, is becoming more prevalent.

 

[omniscence]

Intel reintroduced HT in Nehalem mainly because of Virtualization and NUMA architectures. In NUMA systems cache misses introduce a lot of thread stalling if they access "remote" memory. HT can help with that. Also in heavily virtualized environments (which means significantly more VMs than processors) HT has some advantages because every VM is going to access completely different memory areas causing a lot of cache misses.

Regarding the task manager, I don't know what it actually measures for HT systems. I have never been able to achieve full utilization for a HT system even with a dual X5680 system (12 core/24 threads) running heavily threaded FEM full-wave simulations. Also the windows scheduler seems to switch threads between both logical units of one core sometimes, having the effect of keeping both logical processors below 100% even if the thread consumes 100% CPU time. (This is also done for physical cores, I guess to keep the power consumptions equal between the cores and reduce thermal stress.)

I would like to add that hyperthreading only adds processor contexts but no execution ressources, it cannot boost the performance of arithmetic limited applications working on a small amount of memory (like recursive calculations), only that of memory bandwidth llimited apps.

 

[Hostile]

I went with the 2600k because I only upgrade my CPU and mobo every 3-4 years.

 

[Borocay]

I decided to go with the 2600K because I multitask a lot while I am video encoding. Before upgrading I used a AMD 955BE and it just could not keep up with what i was doing. My computer would stall and pause all the time when I was doing something. Once I upgraded those problems went away. I also upgrade every two or three years so I plan on keeping this processor for at least 2 years so I wanted to future proof my purchase as much as possible.