intel Hyper-Threading?

[iTzCharizardi]

what are the advantages of Hyper-Threading on an...:

i3

i5

i7?

Help

[ScuderiaNerd]

I can start by saying that most i5 have no Hyper-threading...

On the other cpu's, it gives them double the amount of threads, witch is almost doubling the cores, in terms of performance (only in applications that can take advantage of it).

[iTzCharizardi]

I can start by saying that most i5 have no Hyper-threading...

On the other cpu's, it gives them double the amount of threads, witch is almost doubling the cores, in terms of performance (only in applications that can take advantage of it).

yeah i forgot about that

and isnt a virtual core kinda pointless i mean my i3 has it

and i dont know if its really making a difference?

[ScuderiaNerd]

Check these links, and see if it answers your questions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading

[ShadyHost]

If you won't be doing any 3d modeling/video editing, then you don't need HT. Games don't use it very often, but it does come in handy if you are playing a game with 20 tabs open in Chrome and maybe some netflix cooking in the background. Basically HT = multitasking which is nice if you have multiple monitors.

[Delvaris]

I tend to find that hyperthreading is one of those things where if you have to ask "do I need this" you probably don't. Truthfully for games there aren't a whole lot of benefits to it and in most heavily threaded applications the AMD 8-core 4-fpu is going to come out on top. Where it doesn't is anything that is heavy on floating point calculations so really any multimedia creation or encoding is going to be really helped by hyperthreading as well as intel's other multimedia enhancements. Another application where hyperthreading runs away with things is encryption.

All of this, of course is really dependent on the application, the truth is the reason multi-thread architectures either of the physical or virtual variety benefit these tasks so much isn't because there is something inherently "I love multi-threads" about them but because the people who write these programs have optimized them to take advantage of it. Historically these tasks have found themselves being run on workstations or servers with multiple physical processors which laid the groundwork for their continual optimization for multiple threads. Not to belabor the point, but 7zip is heavily optimized for multiple threads so there is a huge difference between hyperthreading on and hyperthreading off. Winzip is programmed in such a way that it doesn't take advantage of multiple threads really at all leading to a situation where there is no appriciable difference between hyperthreading and no hyperthreading. Even so if you look at the relative performance gain from enabling hyperthreading on a 4 core i7 vs a 6 core i7 you don't see the same gain. On the 4 core i7 the times will be cut by as much as 30-40% whereas on the 6 core you will only gain a couple of seconds. Why is this? Because 7zip isn't optimized to take advantage of more than 8 threads so when presented with 12 threads it runs on 8 of them and calls it a day.

What does all this mean for the future? Well it is a given that games will become more optimized to use multiple threads. That's just where the technology is going. Even now there are a fair number of games that are optimized for a dual core but few that are really optimized for more than that. Where you will see it first is in games that make heavy use of the CPU to calculate any number of things like turn based games like Civilization or Galactic Civilizations also in RTS games like Company of Heroes (I expect CoH2 to be heavily multi-threaded). If it ever makes it's way outside of Valve Half Life 3 will probably be heavily multi-threaded as well, it may even make use of the CPU for very deep real time physics calculation which, in my opinion, is where the big utilization for multi-threading will be in the future. On top of just this general push in that direction the console refresh will be absolutely 100% multi-core and will have at least 8 CPU threads, either from an AMD octal archiecture or an intel hyperthreaded 4 core. That will be the game changer for multi-threaded gaming 100%. The sad truth that we are all aware of is that the cycle of "make for PC, port to consoles" has been inverted. Once the consoles can really make use of multiple CPU threads we will see the same for our gaming PCs...except more so.

[iTzCharizardi]

I tend to find that hyperthreading is one of those things where if you have to ask "do I need this" you probably don't. Truthfully for games there aren't a whole lot of benefits to it and in most heavily threaded applications the AMD 8-core 4-fpu is going to come out on top. Where it doesn't is anything that is heavy on floating point calculations so really any multimedia creation or encoding is going to be really helped by hyperthreading as well as intel's other multimedia enhancements. Another application where hyperthreading runs away with things is encryption.

All of this, of course is really dependent on the application, the truth is the reason multi-thread architectures either of the physical or virtual variety benefit these tasks so much isn't because there is something inherently "I love multi-threads" about them but because the people who write these programs have optimized them to take advantage of it. Historically these tasks have found themselves being run on workstations or servers with multiple physical processors which laid the groundwork for their continual optimization for multiple threads. Not to belabor the point, but 7zip is heavily optimized for multiple threads so there is a huge difference between hyperthreading on and hyperthreading off. Winzip is programmed in such a way that it doesn't take advantage of multiple threads really at all leading to a situation where there is no appriciable difference between hyperthreading and no hyperthreading. Even so if you look at the relative performance gain from enabling hyperthreading on a 4 core i7 vs a 6 core i7 you don't see the same gain. On the 4 core i7 the times will be cut by as much as 30-40% whereas on the 6 core you will only gain a couple of seconds. Why is this? Because 7zip isn't optimized to take advantage of more than 8 threads so when presented with 12 threads it runs on 8 of them and calls it a day.

What does all this mean for the future? Well it is a given that games will become more optimized to use multiple threads. That's just where the technology is going. Even now there are a fair number of games that are optimized for a dual core but few that are really optimized for more than that. Where you will see it first is in games that make heavy use of the CPU to calculate any number of things like turn based games like Civilization or Galactic Civilizations also in RTS games like Company of Heroes (I expect CoH2 to be heavily multi-threaded). If it ever makes it's way outside of Valve Half Life 3 will probably be heavily multi-threaded as well, it may even make use of the CPU for very deep real time physics calculation which, in my opinion, is where the big utilization for multi-threading will be in the future. On top of just this general push in that direction the console refresh will be absolutely 100% multi-core and will have at least 8 CPU threads, either from an AMD octal archiecture or an intel hyperthreaded 4 core. That will be the game changer for multi-threaded gaming 100%. The sad truth that we are all aware of is that the cycle of "make for PC, port to consoles" has been inverted. Once the consoles can really make use of multiple CPU threads we will see the same for our gaming PCs...except more so.

Thanks man this really helped alot andi totally agree on the future of PC gaming.