HANDS ON GUIDE

Hyper-Threading

By new we mean 'it's been away awhile'

Hyper-Threading allows a single processing core to accept two process threads simultaneously, effectively creating an additional 'logical' CPU core for every physical CPU core. A quad-core CPU with Hyper-Threading will therefore appear in Windows as an eight-core processor, and the OS will assign threads to all of these eight cores.

Hyper-Threading should prove to be more useful this time around than it was on the Pentium 4. Core i7 has a much wider data execution width per core, a bigger cache and plenty of memory bandwidth, so running a second thread on a processing core should have less of an impact.

Intel claims that by enabling Hyper-Threading, the power draw of Nehalem increases by only 5 per cent, while multi-threaded applications receive a major performance boost.

However, Intel admitted that having two threads execute on the same physical processing core is far from optimal if there’s a spare physical core the thread could be using instead. Apparently, solving this problem means working with software vendors and OS designers (Microsoft) to prevent this.

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