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Intel previews hyper-threading

R

Rob9874

Diamond Member
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,95044,00.asp

"To demonstrate the technology, Otellini and an assistant used Microsoft's Moviemaker to encode a home movie clip, running it on two 3-GHz PCs, one with Hyper-Threading and one without. The test showed a 20 percent performance improvement, according to Otelleni. That may not be much time on a short video clip, but it's a savings of about 15 minutes on a two-hour video, noted the assistant.

In the second demonstration, both machines attempted to encode data while playing full-screen video. The standard 3-GHz PC stumbled, producing jerky video and sound, while the Hyper-Threading PC completed the job smoothly."
 
I've always liked hyperthreading and I feel that Intel should have started using as soon as the Pentium4 was released because it would have made more favourable benchmark results against AMD processors.
 
Its the ability to do two heavy tasks at once that appeals, not necessarily the limited performance boost. I don't foresee huge performance gains going with SMT, but the consumer will be able to feel the difference.
 
hopefully prescott will have hyper threading enabled. i wish there was a way to enable it on current CPU's. the hardware is on the die, afterall.

--jacob
 
I have a Dell Precision 530 with 2 P4's. I have enabled SMT. My observations and personal measurements show a measurable performance gain on threaded applications or tasks that can be run on multiple CPUs. I believe SMT is slightly slower for single threaded apps. The way I have been looking at it is that SMT turns my 2 2.2GHz processors into 4 1.4GHz processors. OK, its a very crude analogy but that seems to sum it up IME.
 
I wonder how many computers that will be able to do this in hardware will get shipped with Windows XP Home edition?

Even Pro only supports 2 CPU's so a dual HT system wouldn't work? The OS would need to address 4 cpu's to do this so you would need 2000 Server!

Someone correct me if I'm wrong. 🙂

Cheers!
 
You're almost right. Windows XP Pro recognizes the difference between logical and physical processors, so if you have two Hyperthreaded processors, it will recognize them as 4. If you have 4 real processors, it will only recognize two. I assume WinXP Home will only recognize one physical and two logical processors. Windows 2000 only recognizes two no matter what.
 
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