How much of a difference does Hyperthreading make?

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LOLZpersonok

LOLZpersonok

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Oct 8, 2011
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I know what Hyperthreading is, how it works and what it's good for, but I don't know how much of a difference in performance it actually makes.

Take two Pentium 4 processors. Both are clocked at 3.0GHz, both have just one processor core, and just for the sake of this example, both are of the same family. One is Hyperthreaded, the other isn't. How much better could the Hyperthreaded P4 perform (in optimized applications) than the one that isn't?
 
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jakegroves

jakegroves

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Basically let's take for instance you are multitasking on your desktop. It feels like you are multitasking but in processor terms you are not. The processor core is executing one Instruction at a time, therefore this causes delay. The delay is how the data from the program Is sent to the processor. Each thread in processor Has to be put In a queue and executed by processor.
So this is where the beauty of hyper threading came in ... It allows each processor core to be able to assign resources to two threads at once! So look at that doubling the speed and supposedly doubling your cores as some noobs would say. But really imagine this : One worker , one conveyor belt, now two, so you could still have delays because the conveyor belt
Could be slowed down, so it isn't as effective as having another core.
BUT, when people say this double your cores ignore th because They will say look at your task manager, but that includes "logical cores" which are not even physical. So don't get fooled.

Performance gains: Current processors are so powerful that they don't even need to use the hyper threading on every day tasks of browsing, emails etc. so you see no performance gain in that area now.

But in heavy duty tasks, boy oh boy like 3d rendering programs Etc built for multi-threaded Performance then you will see A nice speed gain, and you can see it in audio encoding and iTunes aswell ...
Now for figures, sometimes you will see 0%gain and sometimes you will see up to 25-30% gain so it depends on your use of
The computer on what gains you are wanting .
Hope that helps :)
 
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gamerk316

gamerk316

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Jul 8, 2008
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It depends on workload. If you have to do work that needs the same execution resources, then HTT brings very little benefit. If however this is not the case, you can easily get double performance.

http://www.techspot.com/article/1039-ten-years-intel-cpu-compared/page5.html

Look at the Metro Redux benchmarks, specifically between the Pentium and the Core i3. That's the difference Hyperthreading *can* make in the right situation.
 
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