Intel seems to be divulging from what it initially persevered that clock speed in itself is instrumental in the performance of a processor. Intel has launched a new technology called “Hyper-Threading” which they claim offers a 24% increase in performance on its own without its dependency on clock speed.
What is Hyper-Threading Technology
Hyper-Threading works on a mechanism wherein one processor serves the function of two and the other running programs are made to think that they in fact are working on two physical processors. The advantages of 3.06 GHz Pentium 4 is that with hyper-threading you can take any aggregate of applications on your desktop and run them concurrently and avail some degree of advantage that is measurable by an activity completion parameter. So to put it simply you could work on a Power Point presentation, run a virus scan, do some excel calculations and surf the net all at once without having to wait long for Hyper-Threading makes your life easy.
With the Hyper-Threading Technology, Intel has attempted to bid farewell to the established CPU by welcoming the single processor that has replaced the previous functionality of having 2 physical processors. They also offer an alternate logical processor in one package, thereby enabling two differing architectures that in turn also have common resources for physical execution. So from an architectural or software perspective it would imply that the user program and the operating systems can allot threads or processes as usual on any conventional processors.
The system also comprises of four units for logical execution, controllogic, branch predictors and buses. Each of the processors has its unique interrupt controller and is meant to send interrupts only to the particular logical processor that it handles.
Intel’s Pentium 4 has a 20 stage pipeline and seems to be lengthy enough to enable parallel replication as well as execute the resources whilst processing more than a single thread. Intel’s Hyper-Threading Technology is based on concepts such as multi-threaded computation as well as Parallelism and each of these have been previously employed by some other brands as well.
So whilst parallelism is based on the concept of augmenting performance by doing independent tasks at once, “Hyper-Threading” relies on Thread-Level Parallelism which typically revolves around interchanging the usage of chip resources from the present thread that is being executed to the new thread whilst the current thread that is being executed kick starts a lengthy operation for latency. This minimizes the chances of breaks in the pipeline by permitting the next thread to execute when the lengthy operation of the initial thread is over.
Benefits of Hyper-Threading Technology
Hyper-Threading enables software applications that have multiple processors to run without any needed modifications with double the number of logical processors to use thereby resulting in an increase in the use of resources that will be executed within each of the processors.
The end result with Intel’s Hyper-Threading Technology is an overall boost in performance due to multiple simultaneous threads which can be dispatched faster and that also double the number of processors available for the system. The many performance advantages that this new technology has to offer is astounding and Intel with this launch is leaving the user wanting to rethink clock speeds!!!
Author Bio: This is a guest post by Ethan Millers of bw9.com, a site that offers savings and current information on comcast cable deals and comcast internet speeds as well as other Comcast.com services.
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