lt_dan_zsu

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May 3, 2012
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This is not a question about what it does. I have an I7 930. I recently disables hyper threading because I realized that most games only use 4 cores. So I disabled it and I got higher Gflops in intel burn test. Also I was able to OC it higher than I had previously. And now I am getting like 10 more fps in Portal 2. So what is the point of it?
 
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the generic answer:
Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology (Intel® HT Technology) uses processor resources more efficiently, enabling multiple threads to run on each core. As a performance feature, Intel HT Technology also increases processor throughput, improving overall performance on threaded software.

however the software will need to be optimized to take advantage of it. if it is not then there are instances, as you found out, where it may hinder performance.
 
hyperthreading is good for marketing. It also Allows intel a bit more performance in select benchmarks. Realistically, very few programs can really take advantage of hyperthreading. Some programs will even react negatively towards it.
 
It's really good for multitasking and multithreaded apps. Also it's really nice to open your task manager and see 8 cpu charts. Performance may be hindered in applications that aren't optimized for hyperthreading but honestly it won't be very noticeable. You're better off leaving it enabled so you can benefit in applications that take advantage of it.
 
HTT is a basic implementation of SMT. You get a second set of registers to hold the thread context, but none of the execution resources a normal core has are replicated.

Some workloads will see a decent performance gain, but anything particularly process heavy (math) will probably result in a minor loss due to both cores having to share resources.

That being said, from an implementation perspective, HTT is very cheap to implement for Intel.

Also, for the last time: Multithreaded != Multicore. Every application these days uses multiple threads. Whether or not those threads are parallel and heavy usage enough to scale across multiple CPU cores...thats another matter.
 

iTunes doesn't : )

Just saying....
 
Humor him Nikorr and use the thread count column, iTunes encoding is primarily single threaded because it cannot distribute the load to more than one core, its encoding profile is a serial task so the encoding itself is a single core operation but itunes itself has multiple threads.

On the mac i am on ATM, the iTunes has 14 threads when open, most of these are light threads and not exceptionally active, but no program these days is only a single thread, there are always monitoring threads waiting to interrupt it. They are really small so they look like noise on the CPU usage graph when encoding because the primary encoding thread maxes out a core, but the rest of the program is still running in a dozen or so threads spread across the rest of the cores.


Tom's tends to use improper grammer and misleading statements in their reviews. When they say iTunes is single threaded what they actually mean is that it scales very poorly with an increase in the number of cores and threads available to be executed on, not that everything exists in a single program stream.
 
That's what people say, Apple make Mac apps better optimized than for Windows.

I like when I use the dbPoweramp converter how it uses nicely all threads evenly (2600K)

Converting from RAM disk is just a snap.

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"Tom's tends to use improper grammer and ..."

They don't want to confuse anyone : )