Screenshot taken from THG's fifth video: Hyper-Threading under practical conditions.

To provide a clearer picture of the way Hyper-Threading works, we carried out an unusual comparison. The Tom's Hardware labs in Munich compared two identical P4 platforms based on the Intel 850E chipset with Rambus memory (PC1066 - 512 MB, 533 MHz). On one system, the Hyper-Threading was switched off. However, the clock rate of that particular Pentium 4 was 3.6 GHz. The comparison was therefore between a 3 GHz processor with Hyper-Threading and a 3.6 GHz processor without Hyper-Threading.

The question we wanted to answer was: can the 3 GHz chip match the 3.6 GHz speed-demon under practical conditions? The video explains the effect of Hyper-Threading. To maintain video quality while maintaining a compact file size, we encoded the video in MPEG-4 and zipped it - like the previous four Tom's Hardware films. The results are worth seeing. Three minutes of high quality lab video footage in full PAL quality (720 x 576 pixels) with stereo soundtrack occupies a modest 16 MB.

You can download the video here:

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