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Ace's P4 3.06 hyperthreading review is up

Originally posted by: Ace's Hardware

Conclusion:

It is quite remarkable how almost every single threaded benchmark still got a small performance boost from HyperThreading, between 1 and 5%. This shows that HyperThreading has matured as it almost never decreased performance, as it did in the first hyperthreaded Xeons.

Most multi-tasking scenarios were measurably faster with HyperThreading on, and HyperThreading is a very smart way to improve CPU performance. But is it more responsive? In some situations yes. Applications tend to load a bit faster (see the Comanche 4 + Winrar scenario), and performance of the foreground task tends to suffer a bit. Still, don't expect HyperThreading to enable you to run two intensive tasks on your pc. With Winrar in the background, the Comanche framerate went from 61 frames to less than 30, hyperthreaded 3 GHz CPU or not. Like we said in the introduction, we seriously doubt that a hardcore gamer would run an intensive task in the background and risk such low framerates. HyperThreading can enable you to perform relatively light tasks in background (like playing MP3s) while runnning games or other CPU intensive tasks, however.

In our humble opinion, the people who will gain the most from HyperThreading are those who like to run some typical multithreaded applications on their desktop, not the multi-tasking people. If you like to compile, Animate, Encode MPEG4 or render on the same desktop system on which you play games, HyperThreading as a lot to offer. Dual Xeon systems are in many cases too expensive, and Dual Athlons offer rather mediocre performance in gaming as the AMD760MP chipset has limited bandwidth and a relatively high latency. With HyperThreading you get the fast gaming and single threaded performance of a typical desktop CPU, and at the same time, you get a Dual CPU system that is as fast as a lower clocked dual system.
Click to expand...
Still think HT is going to be a dud? 😉
 
Originally posted by: Wingznut
Originally posted by: Ace's Hardware

Conclusion:

It is quite remarkable how almost every single threaded benchmark still got a small performance boost from HyperThreading, between 1 and 5%. This shows that HyperThreading has matured as it almost never decreased performance, as it did in the first hyperthreaded Xeons.

Most multi-tasking scenarios were measurably faster with HyperThreading on, and HyperThreading is a very smart way to improve CPU performance. But is it more responsive? In some situations yes. Applications tend to load a bit faster (see the Comanche 4 + Winrar scenario), and performance of the foreground task tends to suffer a bit. Still, don't expect HyperThreading to enable you to run two intensive tasks on your pc. With Winrar in the background, the Comanche framerate went from 61 frames to less than 30, hyperthreaded 3 GHz CPU or not. Like we said in the introduction, we seriously doubt that a hardcore gamer would run an intensive task in the background and risk such low framerates. HyperThreading can enable you to perform relatively light tasks in background (like playing MP3s) while runnning games or other CPU intensive tasks, however.

In our humble opinion, the people who will gain the most from HyperThreading are those who like to run some typical multithreaded applications on their desktop, not the multi-tasking people. If you like to compile, Animate, Encode MPEG4 or render on the same desktop system on which you play games, HyperThreading as a lot to offer. Dual Xeon systems are in many cases too expensive, and Dual Athlons offer rather mediocre performance in gaming as the AMD760MP chipset has limited bandwidth and a relatively high latency. With HyperThreading you get the fast gaming and single threaded performance of a typical desktop CPU, and at the same time, you get a Dual CPU system that is as fast as a lower clocked dual system.
Click to expand...
Still think HT is going to be a dud? 😉
Click to expand...

I knew it wouldn't be. 😉
 
RE:"Still think HT is going to be a dud?"

Well, yes and no. I see it as a tweak to an already very easily marketed product. Not unlike what MMX was to the classic Pentium. IMHO, the real advantage Intel and the P4 has is it's ability to scale and even overcome some of it's deficiencies by raw Mhz.

So HT appears to be another tablespoon of hot fudge on the sundae.

The fact that HT could eek out a few % points on most all benches they used impressed me the most.

Like I said somewhere else, AMD doesn't have a prayer marketing against Intel and this will make it even harder.
 
Personally, HT isn't too exciting to me since I never play games and doing mp3 at the same time or running a lot of apps at the same time, I like the 3.06GHz though 🙂
 
Originally posted by: Macro2

Well, yes and no. I see it as a tweak to an already very easily marketed product. Not unlike what MMX was to the classic Pentium.
Click to expand...

mmx was a giant marketing failure which is why we got p3 instead of p3 w/SSE
 
Obviously Pocatello you didn't read the article very well...The advantage doesn't just come in multitasking but taking advantage of application that are already multithreaded....Did you see some of the encoding and rendering programs??? Games aside, that is childs play IMO....The encodinh and multimedia is where it is at for me...The multitask does come up in my arena a bit so even a modest 5 percent gain like ace showed is nice when it is FREE!!!!
 
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