Workstation Makes Switch off intel's tool (hyper threading)

[Adul]

http://news.com.com/2100-1001-963942.html?tag=fd_top

Intel's hyperthreading, a performance-enhancing technology that lets one chip act something like two, has been available on workstations since April. But so far it's mostly been taking a nap.

Hewlett-Packard and Dell, among other workstation manufacturers, have been shipping their systems with the function turned off, according to company representatives. Right now, workstation makers say, the broad array of software used in that segment of the market doesn't take advantage of the technology yet. Users, though, can easily turn the hyperthreading function on if they wish.

 

[Thor86]

Huh?

 

[fkloster]

????

 

[Adul]

Originally posted by: fkloster
????

my thoughts exactly

 

[FishTankX]

Well, fish is here again with some late breaking information.

Only the 3.06GHZ P4 has updated hyperthreading, which is suposed to have better performance charachteristics than the previous incarnatrions. I think.

But the fact is that in alot of workstation applications its possible to have performance drop by enabling hyper threading, and in alot of apps, it does nothing. So it ofcourse makes sense to disable hyperthreading on shipping workstations because obviously it'd be a disaster to see a performance drop in a 3,000$ workstation just because of a BIOS setting. On the other had, people who use applications that do see a performance boost should know so, and thus would natrually turn it on. The best of both worlds.

Thus, the OEMs decided to ship it turned off to keep hyperthreading from hurting performance, as obviously not even half of the applications see any gain from hyper threading. It's a bit like enabling two CPU's to work on the same data, if memory bandwidth is the limiting factor it doesn't matter how many CPU's you have, you'll see less performance than you would with one CPU because you've got more snooping/contention/cache coherancy stuff going on to eat up memory bandwidth. Thus, one CPU would actually have the performance advantage in that kinda situation.

A performance hit from hyperthreading is much more common than you might think. Later versions of programs should allow the program itself to switch on hyperthreading or turn it off through the HAL or something, allowing the best of both worlds. This way, all shipping workstations would turn on hyperthreading when a performance benefit is there, and turn it off when hurts performance.

Fish, signing out.