Intel's Pentium Performance Hangs on a Hyper-Thread

Two Threads Are Better Than One

By rendering a single physical processor to serve as two processors, HT represents a departure from traditional CPU processor performance improvements involving either boosting the clock speed or cache designs.

With two copies of the architectural state on each physical processor, the system appears to have four logical execution units, branch predictors, control logic, and buses.

Each logical processor has its own interrupt controller. Interrupts sent to a specific logical processor are handled only by that logical processor.