Great article on hyperthreading!

[lookin4dlz]

HyperThreading for the lay man

The third page discusses the "new" hyperthreading technology that solves the hyperthreading used in Xenon's that may have slowed processing on some tasks.

What's cool is that the article says WinXP Home Edition can utilize hyperthreading

 

[Duvie]

Nice read!!! Lets bump it up for others to read....

I think the article places a little too much optimism on the hammer based on that 800mhz beta testing.....seems like an older article...Old roadmaps would have had 3.2ghz p4 with HT competing against hammer debut but now it would look like a good chance for 3.33 or even 3.6ghz p4 533fsb chips at time of hammer debut at end of 1H 03.

The fact is I am more willing to by a p4 with hyperthreading then having to buy a new mobo and new OS to get a new chip to work like the hammer...I mean it would have to be like 20-25 percent gains in performance and then again if the HT works like listed in the article I find a lot of use for that in my system right now and may be tough for hammer to match even with a large performance increase.


Again nice read...answered a lot of my questions about Ht .

 

[DimZiE]

a nice article i think everybody should read it...

i was really curious about what HyperThreading is all about....
this article really helps..

thanks lookin4dlz

 

[andreasl]

For a much better article on SMT, read the article at Ars Technica. Here they explain several different forms of multithreaded CPU implementations.

 

[lookin4dlz]

andreasl thanks for the additional link! I just skimmed this one, but it appears to be more technically oriented.

What is cool about hyperthreading is that with my next motherboard purchase, I won't need another upgrade to get dual processor type results Heck, if Win XP home does support HT, then I don't even need to change my OS In a year, I'll just upgrade to a P4 3.06GHz or better processor & oc it to 4GHz or better! Even better would be the ability to turn HT on/off via the OS in case you're running a single program that doesn't need it (i.e. this particular program runs better w/o HT).

Now, I've got a question on Intel's P4 architecture...

Was the longer P4 pipeline designed with HT in mind? It seems to me that with HT, once an instruction set is set on its merry way on a thread, that you would want it to continue on that thread so that something else can use one of the other available threads so a long pipeline works well. I'm not an engineer, so someone please let me know if I'm on the right track here!