Intel Corp (INTC)

[ChipGeek]

Ya know, I've been wondering what kind of performance impact hyperthreading might have on Silverthorne.

I know there's been some skepticism about performance due to the processor being an in-order design, but at first blush it seems like an in-order pipeline would get more of an incremental benefit from multi-threading than an out-of-order design. I wonder if the Intel architects found through their simulations that HT has a higher ROI in terms of ILP than adding the OOO overhead. Of course, the downside is you need OS and application support, but x86 has been doing the heavy lifting there for the last 5-7 years.

I know this is just one benchmark, but the improvement with HT enabled looks pretty remarkable...