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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?"
Neither SMP nor hyperthreading are prerequisites to writing multi-threaded programs. They run just fine on single-cpu machines, so long as the thread library and the OS' scheduler do a decent job. It's nice when you can run multiple threads concurrently on multiple CPUs, or with hyperthreading, but it's a stretch to say "now we can finally start writing multithreaded programs."
Heres a new review of the 3.06 HT at Sharky Extreme
But since NT/2000/XP has all disk I/O in critical regions, your system still grinds to a standstill.
The day Microsoft OS's are not ridiculously I/O-bound, this will make a much bigger difference... for Microsoft users.
Of course, I guess there's a point to helping your filesystem remain intact when Granny or the baby flips the Big Red Switch without shutting down...
The moral: Use lots and lots and lots of RAM with Microsoft
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
And while we're comparing experience, I have a 2-way PPro-200 system, a 2-way P3-450 system, and a 1-way P4-1.6 system. Both of the MP machines are far more responsive for, well, every task that I throw at them: the only reason I don't have only MP boxes is the cost.
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.