Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[HailMary]

You'll probably get extreme arguments both ways on this board. Hyperthreading is Intel's marketing name for SMT (simultaneous multithreading). It allows the processor to act as 2 processors, but the catch is they share 1 physical core processor. One thread will almost never utilize all of the execution power of a single core, and SMT allows a second thread to try to get some of that waste back. There is a small overhead inherent in SMT designs for doing this, so in some cases there is more waste than a traditional core. This is not a new invention. AMD could use it if they chose too, but they have commented in the past that they don't think SMT is worth the tradeoffs to implement it. This may be true for them. SMT has different levels of benefit depending on the core. For AMD cores it may not help at all, while on the Intel cores it does. The P4 that is out now has Hyperthreading enabled, and you can go look around at reviews to see how much of a difference it makes (it is not a giant leap). The new Prescott core is rumored to have an improved SMT implementation, so that may change. AMD should probably implement this though, because it is possible to write software that runs better on an SMT processor than it does on a non-SMT processor. This will likely be flaunted in future benchmarks (and probably already is in some current benchmarks).

HailMary