Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Who Will Benefit From Hyper-Threading?

Posted by Cliff on from the does-it-live-up-to-the-hype dept.

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?"

7 of 55 comments (clear)

  1. Developers by IshanCaspian · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Developers by PaulBu · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Two points:
      They built a "half-smp" inside a single processor.

      It's more of smp squared (or at least doubled... ;) ) -- threads in multithreaded app share instructon AND data caches (no cache coherency problems which are going to plague SMP implementations more and more), as well as register files (fast data exchange which does not require access to the main memory nor even to the inter-processor bus).

      one should code multi-threaded for apps that can benefit from parallelism

      One? Or the compiler? You use s/w available in source code, right? ;-)

  2. Marketing. . . by Cokelee · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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!

    1. Re:Marketing. . . by qoncept · · Score: 2, Interesting
      I believe its called optimizing. I suppose there are alternate routes -- they could just slap more chips on and require an external powersource, a la Voodoo5. But I'm sure as we all know, without optimization, computers would have gone nowhere.

      Sure Intel is using Hyper-Threading as a buzz word, but that doesn't mean its worthless. Your beloved AMD copied SSE, and made their own 3DNow! and you'd have a hard time convincing me either of those will have the impact hyperthreading does. I saw someone compared the price of a p4 with hyperthreading to that of a dual athlon, but thats not the point. Its the technology. Don't you think AMD and everyone else who makes cpus for anything would be interested in taking advantage of it? If it was AMD (and I really dont think anyone else, except maybe Motorola) who had introduced HT, slashdotters would love it.

      Of course I don't like Intel (and of course I hate Bill Gates more, and Steve Jobs has everyone beat), but that doesn't mean having them around isn't healthy for the entire industry.

      By the way, has anyone else noticed nvidia trying the brute force tactic like 3dfx did right before they went out?

      --
      Whale
  3. This is a great feature by Joe+Tennies · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  4. Not Me by Konster · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I read several reviews, most notable among them are here and here. Although the technology seems compelling when looking forward a few years, its infancy just doesn't sell me the product, especially when I consider that a dual Athlon MP 2000 (1.6Ghz) is respectably close to the $700 PIV 3.06GHz with HT, and costs a LOT less.

    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...

  5. Re:Everyone misses by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Try to take your windows installation and make a run-from-CD version, like Knoppix is to linux.

    You will soon find that windows craps out on all kinds of stuff because it needs to touch the harddrive for silly things, and can't run off of read only media.

    After getting around the basic ones by moving those files to ram disks, you will find that windows needs to touch certain files everytime a new process starts; that's when you realize your project is fucked and give up.