- Feb 18, 2010
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I have had this question floating around my mind for some time now. I have searched for answers on this, but nothing I found has directly answered this question. If this has laready been discussed here, please forgive me for asking again.
I have read about how HT can actually give a performance decrease on some games and how a lot of gamers/OCers will buy CPUs without HT or just turn it off. That is one of the reasons I decided on the i5 750 instead of the i7 860. Since I have no use for 8 threads at the moment, so it was the logical choice.
Thinking ahead to Jan 9th (yes I am going to order SB the first day it is available), I want to ask this question so I can make the most educated choice I can for my next purchase (and all future purchases).
If a user has a CPU with 4 physical cores with HT on (8 logical cores seen by the OS), how does the workload get assigned to the cores and in which order? Does Windows 7 handle this? Or does some logic inside the CPU/chipset handle this? And does HT only kick in once all 4 physical cores are used first? Or is there a chance a 2-thread application will use 1 physical core and 1 HT core instead of 2 physical cores?
*Edit*
I read the other HT thread on these forums from a few weeks ago. It was a great discussion on HT performance (logical vs physical cores), how logical cores are assigned, performance percentages, etc. But most of the conversation assumed that 4-8 threads were being run at one time. I want to know how running 2-3 threads would be handled on a 4 core CPU without HT vs a 4 core CPU with HT.
I have read about how HT can actually give a performance decrease on some games and how a lot of gamers/OCers will buy CPUs without HT or just turn it off. That is one of the reasons I decided on the i5 750 instead of the i7 860. Since I have no use for 8 threads at the moment, so it was the logical choice.
Thinking ahead to Jan 9th (yes I am going to order SB the first day it is available), I want to ask this question so I can make the most educated choice I can for my next purchase (and all future purchases).
If a user has a CPU with 4 physical cores with HT on (8 logical cores seen by the OS), how does the workload get assigned to the cores and in which order? Does Windows 7 handle this? Or does some logic inside the CPU/chipset handle this? And does HT only kick in once all 4 physical cores are used first? Or is there a chance a 2-thread application will use 1 physical core and 1 HT core instead of 2 physical cores?
*Edit*
I read the other HT thread on these forums from a few weeks ago. It was a great discussion on HT performance (logical vs physical cores), how logical cores are assigned, performance percentages, etc. But most of the conversation assumed that 4-8 threads were being run at one time. I want to know how running 2-3 threads would be handled on a 4 core CPU without HT vs a 4 core CPU with HT.
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