importance of hyperthreading?

[CJP]

I use my computer for surfing and gaming. Would a Pentium 4 with hyperthreading make a difference for someone like me? The Athlon 64 looks like a great chip but from what I've read it doesn't have hyperthreading. Does this matter at all?

 

[Stealth1024]

Well your games and OS probably are not going to take advantage of a 64 bit processor...

 

[Davegod]

hyperthreading does practically nothing for gaming, and when surfing you probably wouldnt notice if your 3ghz cpu was running at half speed. hyperthreading, and especially CPU with dual cores, seems likely to become more prominent in the medium-long term future, but games will make decent use of 64bit before HT becomes a serious benefit for gaming.

TBH, neither tech is anything like essential right now, and wont suddenly be needed for direct-x 9.1 or something. Just go look at a few CPU comparison "benchmark" roundups and get which ever one is faster -- that is faster on software that is relevant to you (i.e. focus on game benchmarks) -- for whatever money you have. btw remember to not look only at CPU price but the overall effect, i.e. include suitable motherboard.

 

[NightCrawler]

Moving to dual cores will probably be next and both AMD and Intel will do that. The Athlon 64 is already designed for dual core purpose and will be released Q4 in 2004 according to AMD.

Apps written with hyperthreading in mind will run well on AMD dual core cpu's so AMD will actually benefit from hyperthreading.


PS: The Athlon 64 3000 is the bang for your buck CPU deal right now !

 

[CJP]

Originally posted by: NightCrawler
Moving to dual cores will probably be next and both AMD and Intel will do that. The Athlon 64 is already designed for dual core purpose and will be released Q4 in 2004 according to AMD.

Apps written with hyperthreading in mind will run well on AMD dual core cpu's so AMD will actually benefit from hyperthreading.


PS: The Athlon 64 3000 is the bang for your buck CPU deal right now !

I hadn't heard about dual core cpu's before but it sounds interesting. My timeframe for upgrading was q3 of 2004 when the pci express video card from ATI comes out (r423) but I'd wait for q4 if the dual core cpu's are going to come out then.

 

[Spearhawk]

It'll be a long time before the majorit of the games start taking advantage of hyperthreading/SMP mainly due to the fact that it's a royal pain to write multithreaded games. Games is very well suited for single threads, sure you could for example write the AI to use a thread of its own, while the physics use another and other game logic a third but that brings up the complexity level to a whole new level which of course leads to more bugs (just imagine keeping track of x number of threads, each of them which are uterly dependent on the others).