Multithreading - What's it Mean to Developers?

Posted by Hemos on Monday March 14, 2005 @05:40AM from the the-power-of-the-sun dept.

sysadmn writes "Yet another reason not to count Sun out: Chip Multithreading. CMT, as Sun calls it, is the use of hardware to assist in the execution of multiple simultaneous tasks - even on a single processor. This excellent tutorial on Sun's Developer site explains the technology, and why throughput has become more important than absolute speed in the enterprise. From the intro: Chip multi-threading (CMT) brings to hardware the concept of multi-threading, similar to software multi-threading. ... A CMT-enabled processor, similar to software multi-threading, executes many software threads simultaneously within a processor on cores. So in a system with CMT processors, software threads can be executed simultaneously within one processor or across many processors. Executing software threads simultaneously within a single processor increases a processor's efficiency as wait latencies are minimized. "

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Re:I didn't RTFA but... by leoc · 2005-03-14 05:49 · Score: 0, Redundant

I don't think it does. It sounds very very similar, and they even cite an Intel paper on Hyperthreading in the bibliography.

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STFU about slashdot bias.
And how is this different from hyperhreading? by qwertphobia · 2005-03-14 05:54 · Score: 0, Redundant

And how is this different from hyperhreading?

Seriously, is there a difference, or is this just a marketing name to differentiate the two?

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Never ask for directions from a two-headed tourist! -Big Bird
Re:it means a lot by JebusIsLord · 2005-03-14 10:27 · Score: 0, Redundant

wow, that was insightful... care to elaborate? I was thinking the same thing as the grandparent... Java is one of the few languages which make multithreading relatively painless, and the abstraction therein would be very complimentary to this type of technology. For Sun, this makes sense!

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Jeremy