Stagger Lee wrote:
[...]

Then perhaps you'd better take a remedial reading course.  The claim by Twisted
Hardware is utter rot.
In other words, the phrase "can only use 50% of your CPU" is baloney.

You need to check what you know and more importantly, what you *don't* know.

I could let you stagger around the web to discover your ignorance...


However, to be brief:

'Hyperthreading' is an Intel marketing term for a very old trick of keeping the multiple internal CPU functional units simultaneously busy.

To the OS, the one physical CPU appears to be two distinct CPUs. Hence, if only one process is running, the best reported utilisation is 50% (or rather, 100% for one of the two hyperthread CPUs).

You can run a second process to keep the second 'hyperthread' CPU busy.

Intel claim upto a 30% increase in _throughput_ by using hyperthreading. Reality is somewhat less than this depending on what programs you run. As it happens, s@h can take good advantage of hyperthreading to gain a better throughput (one s@h process per hyperthread CPU).

COMPRENDIE?



Cheers,
Martin