Ars Technica on Hyperthreading

radiokills writes "Ars Technica has a highly-informative technical paper up on Hyper-Threading. It's a technical overview of how simultaneous multithreading works, and what problems it will introduce. It also explains why comparing the technology to SMP is Apples to Oranges, in a sense. Starting with the 3 GHz Pentium 4, this tech will be standard in Intel's desktop lines (it's already in the Xeon), so this is important stuff."

Comments

No

[chainrust]

I refuse to support Intel as long as they support Palladium and DRM.

Re:No

[Billly Gates]

Not offtopic. If someone refuses a product based on principal or company ethics then its a valid point. Unfortunately it wont make a difference in the corporate market which is where this will sell but a -1 offtopic karma is inappropriate.

apples to oranges?

[edrugtrader]

come on, more like oranges to tangerines...

you are dealing with data instruction streams going on independantly, sure maybe only x2 or more with SMP, but x anything is infinately greater than x1 when dealing with threads.

and what is really the difference with oranges and tangerines? man i hate tangerines... if anything they are worse than oranges, but so similar. all tangerines should be destroyed. and thus i have proven why hyper-threading will fail.

on that note:
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Web Developer II

Re:Might not speed up benchmarks...

[Anonymous Coward]

> SMP setups tend to be wonderfully responsive under background loads

Yes. Guess why ? Because there is an idle processor.

Guess why ? Because the background task is generally single-threaded.

> so I'd guess that allowing the CPU to run more than one thread at a time would make the UI a little more responsive on single-proc machines.

Yes. basically, you'll have a virtual processor for the display server and one for the application. Very smooth.

> Now, all we need are the UNIX developers to stop being afraid of multithreading and maybe some of us UNIX users would be able to take advantage of this

Of course not. There will be no idle processor when executing a multi-threaded background task.

Your setup will become as unresponsive as with a single core...

Cheers,

--fred

SMP is the way grasshopper

[El_Nofx]

This is awesome, because SMP is the future baby.

After running single cpu systems for 10 years I finally antied up and built a dual 1 gig P III box, I would never go back.

There are many many reasons for this, first off my computer hasn't locked up in probobly 4 months, I always have a free processor to kill the app! Even though faily few programs are multi-threaded, SETI@HOME, Photoshop, etc, I still use them both evenly by running 3 or 4 things at once...

I still love to be able to burn a cd, listen to music and play counter-stike all at the same time.

I heard of a Higher-UP at Transmetta saying that SMP was crap one time, what a moron, no wonder they aren't doing that well.

Now maybe when we start seeing Asyncronous processor systems come down to the desktop level is when things will really start to cook..