What is Hyper-Threading and how does it work?

[The AchieVer]

At first, we had single core CPUs. These CPUs were clocked at a certain speed and could deliver performance at that particular speed. Then came the age of CPUs with multiple cores. Here, every individual core could deliver its own speed independently. This exponentially increased the power of a CPU and thereby increased the overall performance of the computing device. But the human tendency is to always look out for even better. Hence, multithreadingwas introduced which slightly increased the performance – but then came Hyper-Threading. Now, it bought up the performance of the CPU to an all-time high. With the implementation of hyperthreading, the CPU was always kept busy with the execution of some of the other tasks.

 

Hyperthreading is Intel’s first attempt to bring down parallel computation to consumer PCs. It was first introduced with Intel’s Xeon chip, and then it made an appearance to the consumer based SoCs with the Pentium 4. It is present in Intel’s Itanium, Atom as well as Core ‘i ‘ series of processors.

What is Hyper-Threading

It is like going from a one-lane highway to a two-lane highway. It allows each core to accomplish two things at a time.

 

With Hyperthreading, Intel aims to bring down the execution time of a particular task. This means that a single core of a processor will be executing multiple tasks at a time. Eventually, this will bring down the time taken for a task to be executed fully. For each physical CPU core, there are two logical cores by the operating system. These 2 logical cores act as a buffer to share the workload and passing the process that needs execution to the physical core while the other one fetches the next data that it needs to execute tasks further.

It directly takes advantage of the superscalar architecture in which multiple instructions operate on separate data in parallel. But for this, the operating system must be compatible too. This means that the operating system must support SMT or simultaneous multithreading. Also, according to Intel, if your operating system does not support this functionality, you should just disable hyperthreading.

Some of the advantages of Hyper threading are-

1. Run demanding applications simultaneously while maintaining system responsiveness
2. Keep systems protected, efficient, and manageable while minimizing the impact on productivity
3. Provide headroom for future business growth and new solution capabilities

 

Summing up, if you are still unaware of what it actually does, in simple words, you can say that while you read this article, there is a good chance that your computer is checking for updates in the background or your antivirus is scanning your computer for malware. This is all enabled in the background because of your processor that supports hyperthreading.

 

Source

[The AchieVer]

Dear @DonyMach1

 

This time you read the article without pointing towards the font color , i really appreciate that.

 

BTW now i have changed the color to dark gray.

 

Regards