What is Hyper Threading | All you need to know about Hyper-threading | Tech Fleckk

What is Hyper Threading ?

Intel's hyper-threading technology was used to enhance the simultaneous execution of computer tasks that are running. For over 10 years, it has been on Intel's computer processors and still, just like the Mysterious Fox, most individuals know very little about it. Just for that reason, I'm here to teach you all about hyper-threading. So, let's start with an analogy. Let's say I'm a CPU and I'm trying to eat or process food. I can only do as much eating as one mouth can do, as some people call it. If I could add more mouths, more mouths could be processed.

This is what multi-core processors do, but it's not always possible to take that approach because of cost constraints, among other things, so I only have one mouth.

To pick up the food, I can use my hand to bring it to my mouth and then take another bite while my mouth is occupied. If I stop chewing before my hand is ready to give me more food, then if only I could use two hands to prepare food for my mouth, my mouth just sits there doing nothing, even though my mouth can't really function any faster. I wouldn't waste any time and will say oh wait, I can see Hyper-threading, one processor, and smart scheduling to make sure it works pretty awesome at all times. Well, usually for single threaded workloads, Hyper-threading can't do anything where you can only focus on one element at a time.

For example, if you want to eat a two-scoop ice cream cone, once the top scoop has already been eaten, you can not operate on the bottom scoop and no one can help you if you first attempt to eat the cone. In this case, the addition of more mouths or more hands is no advantage. On the contrary, eating from a bowl of candies to catch and eat a red candy does not depend in any way on finishing the blue candy that's already in my mouth. In fact, if I had any friends to help me eat it, by adding more hands and more mouths, we could consume the candy very quickly. This is an example of a multi-threaded workload and Hyper-threading will certainly assist with this.

All right, now let's take it away for a minute from the eating example and carry it back to the computational activities of the real world that benefit from Hyper-threading and multiple processing cores. 3d rendering on your PC is a perfect example of video editing and intense multitasking, because when one frame of a video is edited, the next is queued up because the video is already taken. The PC doesn't have to guess what it already knows is going to be in the next picture.

Here's another example of multitasking, one processor can handle your light tasks such as music playback, excel, antivirus, and whatever else you have in the background, while another can focus all its attention on running a power-hungry video game in the foreground, so how would you actually choose a processor for your PC with that out of the way. The first thing I hope you got out of this is that Hyper-threading is not the same as doubling your core of processing whatever task manager might say.

It's basically a clever trick for more efficient scheduling of the work that is done by the processing cores that you have. It also increases power consumption and heat output a little bit, but the benefits usually outweigh this drawback in the real world. You can get massive double-digit increases in performance all the way to no change in performance at all. And even very marginally decreased performance in very rare instances depends on how the program is optimized. So, it's important to do your homework on the program that you're going to run. If the job you do is not heavily multi-threaded, then you will do just as well to save your cash and buy a Hyper-threaded processor.

Most games right now can take advantage of more than a couple of threads however if the work you do is heavily multi-threaded then remember this general rule Hyper-threading is better than no hyper threading but is not nearly as good as adding more physical processors in an ideal world. Lots of physical processors, each with Hyper-threading is now everywhere.