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Who Will Benefit From Hyper-Threading?
qoncept asks: "I've read a number of reviews of Intel's new Pentium 4 3.06ghz processor with multithreading and I've noticed that perhaps it is being reviewed as an option to the wrong people, and in fact Intel may even be marketing it to the wrong people. It seems that, as a business move, Hyper-Threading may not have been worth Intel's investing in it. Most reviews show that in single threaded benchmarks, there are literally no benefits to using HT. In multithreaded processes, the results are moderate at best. Yet, of course, the reviews seem to say the feel is better. There you go -- it won't increase your productivity by compiling your Java. But, price point permitting, it may be exactly what the casual home user wants -- save money by getting, say a 3.06ghz HT CPU instead of a 3.6ghz CPU without, yet have Internet Explorer, mIRC, AIM and Word run just as 'comfortably.' The benchmarks don't say much for HT, but I'm at least slightly excited about it. What about everyone else?"
I really look forward to being able to run multi-threaded apps on the average user's desktop. There are a lot of advantages to being able to have two lines of logic running concurrently. Although there are few performance benefits right now i'm sure developers will appreciated the ubiquity of SMP and all of the nifty programming techniques that come with it.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
yet have Internet Explorer, mIRC, AIM and Word run just as 'comfortably.'
They run extremely comfortably on a 1.0 GHz CPU system already.
The point in 2+ CPU systems. It's not about getting multithreaded apps gettin faster, it's about getting more programs run together better.
When using 2 cpus (or HT), when one process takes all the juice there's still some left for everything else, and system will appear more responsive.
So, there You go, You can encode some divx, and still browse comfortably net, or listen to mp3's, or watch some divx. (Of course I don't know how effective HT is, but my 2xAthlon lets me do just that).
fucktard is a tenderhearted description
and a 500Mhz p3
and 99% of the time you wouldn't know the difference
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
they've just invented a feature that their marketing department can say without lying that their chip has that others don't.
the fact that it doesn't do anything useful for most uses at the moment makes no difference.
it's the only way with Intel. They can't really make a faster processor, so they're always coming up with new ways to make it "feel" faster, or make the clock speed higher.
I'm not excited at all. What about resonance? Multithreading with simultaneous and common processes may cause it to run SLOWER!
Heres a new review of the 3.06 HT at Sharky Extreme
Don't forget that this is on a processor with NetBurst Architecture, so it makes the Internet faster. Now with NetBurst AND HyperThread those web pages will be on your screen before you've clicked the button.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
As much as I am really rooting for AMD, I must say that I wish the Athlon's had this feature. The average user is not going to notice a big difference right now because most applications have been so optimized for single processor computers that they perform poorly on SMP computers. The big thing that hyperthreading is going to do is allow for more registers on the X86 architecture w/o changing the instruction set at all. This is the big enhancement and why I am so excited about it.
3.06GHz PIV + motherboard + 512MB DDR RAM = $1025
2 Athlon MP 2000 + motherboard + 512MB DDR RAM = $695....for 80-90% of the performance of the HT PIV?
Sorry, but I can get the basics for an SMP system for $5 less than Intel wants for its new flagship CPU.
Now, if I could get 2 PIV 2.4 GHz CPUS with HT, that might be a different story...
Hmmmm.. seems to me that a 28k modem will still only give you 28k. Does anyone with cable/dsl/T1 have speed issues with their web browsing? http pipelining seems more useful. If only 'the rest' of the web would cater to it.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Intel will benefit from this because people will THINK that they are getting a better processor and therefore buy into it without reading the reviews and benchmarks.
However, the server-end of the market will probably be Intel's target audience with the consumer market at the side.
High-grade servers will benefit from HT because it will allow for better load balancing and server efficency.
Intel has nothing to lose by releasing it, so why not?
Windows already does this.
"Hey man, have you heard about this new invention? It's called a Compact Disc!"
"Forget about it man, they're worthless. My record player gets crap sound out of them."
How about MMX? What about 3D cards? We had to wait until software came out that really took advantage of them before we could see what it could really do. Some apps are developed for multithreading, but the hardware's got to be in wide release before it's worth it to developers to write for it.
I think in the end we'll all benifit, but just like every other technology it'll take some time.
In our preliminary tests of a unit Intel donated, we were able to run four instances of a single threaded process on a dual-proc HT machine. The performance was somewhat greater than two instances on the same box.
Admittedly, not conclusive results and we've yet to run more controlled tests, but our initial take is that you might achieve higher rack density of processes and throughput using this architecture.
Sorry I don't have specific data, we're still studying HT.
These opinions guaranteed or your money back.
The funniest quote from the original news story at:t ml
;) If anything, it will make worst-case response for these real-time tasks worse!
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/19980.h
Intel cited a Harris Interactive (Nasdaq: HPOL) Latest News about Harris Interactive study it commissioned that showed the vast majority of computer users do more than one task at a time on their machines, with 50 percent saying they play video games while also burning CDs, for instance. Many of those same users say older machines purchased three or more years ago can have difficulty performing several tasks at once.
So, how EXACTLY hyperthreading will help an I/O bound problem (burning a CD) AND a GPU-bound problem (rendering OpenGL) simultaneously?
Just some stupid marketoid speaking... I like Apple's straightforward approach ("Supercomputer on your desk/lap") way better... At least Apple is not trying to convince people that a fine (for many applications which know how to use it!) feature in their CPU can really help mundane tasks like burning a CD.
Paul B.
I guess you missed the implied smiley.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The performance was somewhat greater than two instances on the same box.
If somewhat falls in the 5%-10% range, then hyperthreading is just a lot of marketing crap.
On the other hand, if somewhat falls in the 40%-60% range, then hyperthreading is the next big killer product [or "killer app," as the software guys would call it].
Frankly, I'm a little curious about the question of contention. As far as I can tell, the threads in a hyperthreaded processor are contending for bandwidth on the same pipeline to RAM, so, unless your apps get lucky and experience some serious cache hits, your gonna see a net performance loss on hyperthreading. This fear seems to be born out in many of the test data at Tom's, Anandtech, Extreme, et al: Performance is 5%-10% WORSE with hyperthreading than without it.
The new AMD memory chipset is supposed to introduce switching to memory contention: A classical Intel memory bus is a hub [shared pipelines], whereas the modern AMD memory bus is [or will be] a switch [unique pipelines]. Of course, that makes the AMD bus fantastically more complicated, and may be one of the reasons they're having so much difficulty bringing Hammer to market.
Check out this article that answers your question. It shows how the new Intel chip in a Dell workstation blows the pants off a dual-cpu Apple computer for less cost.
Just as a test, I recently installed Windows XP on a Celeron 333MHz machine with 128MB. A few pauses here and there, but it basically runs Mozilla, IE6, Word simultaneously just fine. The ancient (1997) hard disk seems to be more of a performance limiter than the cpu.
:-)
Perhaps the pauses are just Intel sponsored advertising so you dont forget there are faster cpu's coming out every so often.
Honestly, I am incredibly excited about this hardware, but not for the same reasons you might (or might not) be -
Fourteen years ago I was doing development on a 6MHz PC/AT. Today high end machines are 3GHz using HT for performance boosting. That pretty much supports Moore's law at 1.5x per year (1.5^14 ~= 500x). My dev box of yore was 512k of RAM, current box running 2G, for a 1.8x per year sustained over 14 years (1.8^14 ~= 4000x) Hard drives? 10M to 160G for a 14 year sustained rate of 2x per year.
In two years, a high end system will be somewhere in the 6.5GHz range with 8G of RAM and a full Terabyte of hard drive space if I want to splurge and spend $2,000 for the uberSystem. Now THAT excites me.
Of course Windows, Office, and the next generation of Studio will still run like pigs, but hey - that's life.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
It's a big win if your OS's scheduler sucks, but supports multiprocessors.