HT Technology

Hi, does anyone in here know what the Pentium 4's Hyper-Threading feature actually does? B)

I would like to know that also....

Basically, It's a "boosted" CPU lets you for example play games and render a movie while you don't get any lose in performance.

I will give more info latter if no one will beat me to it first ;)

Yup, HT splits one physical CPU in to two 'logical' ones, which can then work separately in order to multitask more efficiently. Basically it can do two things at the same time. A 'Thread' is jargon for a task.

But although it speeds up two tasks running at the same time, its not as good as actually having two physical CPUs, becuase two logical CPUs still have to share resources like bus bandwidth and cache.

Hyper Threading (probably making things more complicated)

(Beat ya! Hehe.. :P )

In other words - useless, another marketing crap...
Point a good example when you really need it...

Yah, usually no performance increase for games..unless you wanna play two at the same time on different monitors like D.A.R.Y.L. or something!

Theoretically yu'd use it if yu ran two CPU intensive progs together that one CPU alone cudnt handle, but I cant come up with any examples..apart from Grim's above

Its not for me. Unless games support it, they will be affected negetivaly. I don't know about you guys, but im not running 5 apps when playing, im runing 1-3. I don't need seperate threads, and with the Game only running on 1 thread, ur computer still has to double check the 2nd. so unless its programmed to divide itself, HT might hurt u(if u play games with only 1-3 apps open)

It causes instablitity for some people(fycus) and hurts load times and fps for me.

Originally posted by Choupolo@Jan 1 2005, 05:25 PM
Theoretically yu'd use it if yu ran two CPU intensive progs together that one CPU alone cudnt handle, but I cant come up with any examples..apart from Grim's above

Exactly, what would you do? zip something AND play a game?
Back to drawing board intel ;)

That's why you buy an AMD CPU!! AMD is teh R0XXAL0T!!

HT is theoretically a good idea, which gives programmers the chance to develop multithreaded code for games, so gfx, ai, physics etc can all run at the same time. But not many games bothered with it cause half of consumers had AMDs too, and also because 2-3GHz is more than enough to handle todays games on its own. However, some games that totally ignored it even lost performance due to inefficient use of the two logical CPUs. Most games now tho the difference cud be a few fps either way.

HT is pretty useless then, but its secondary effect was to get developers ready for implementing multithreading in their code. Future processors will be physically multi-cored CPUs, like that of AMD64s and the next gen consoles CPUs. Multithreading is an important advancement in the way developers code things, and will be increasingly important for future games that want complex ai, gfx etc all working at the same time, too complex for a single CPU core to handle.

So HT will be obsolete, and probably already is by now. But its highlighted the importance of multithreading and has started the evolution to physically multi-cored CPUs.