Pentium 4 Dual-Core?

[snowzsan]

I thought Pentium 4 chips were all single core? I bought my brother's old tower off him that he traded his neighbour a case of beer for (lol) and I was running through the system specs and it has two Pentium 4 cores listed. I thought it might have been a glitch and I had to format and reinstall windows anyway because... Well it's the first thing I do with ANY used computer if I'm not replacing the HDD.

Anyway, windows is reinstalled and it's still listing it as two separate cores at 3.34GHz each. Again, I'm still believing this is a glitch or the system is failing. So I open up the task manager and checked the Performance tab and it's showing two separate graphs, both with different usages. So I loaded up a desktop gadget in Win7 and it's still showing two separate cores operating independently. I checked the bios and there's no hyperthreading (Though would a P4 even support hyperthreading anyway?)

I'm a little confused on the matter. I've tried googling P4 Dual-Cores and nothing relevant came up.

Any ideas?

 

[joytech22]

Heyy Snowzsan.

The particular Pentium 4 your machine has comes with Hyperthreading, that means it splits each CPU core into two logical cores each.

It actually has one CPU core, but the system can see it as two to get work done faster.

The computers at my college have the same CPU. Hope this helped.

 

[snowzsan]

So is the hyperthreading option in the Bios hidden? I cannot locate any way to turn it on or off. That's why I assumed it wasn't hyperthreading.

 

[Supernova1138]

Hyperthreading options should be in the BIOS under the CPU options, I believe it is usually called 'Intel HT Technology' in most BIOS.

 

[nna2]

Hyperthreading options should be in the BIOS under the CPU options, I believe it is usually called 'Intel HT Technology' in most BIOS.

unless its a intel board

 

[loneninja]

If it's an OEM system it may not have the option to disable/enable Hyperthreading, they tend to have very limited BIOS options.

 

[nna2]

If it's an OEM system it may not have the option to disable/enable Hyperthreading, they tend to have very limited BIOS options.

to add to that, i dont know why you would want hyperthreading off, with it on it would be close to doubling the preformance in cpu heavy applications