Hyperthreading technology from Intel has been on their computer processors for
over 10 years. And yet, much like the
elusive fox, most people know very little about what it says. Let's start
with an analogy. Let's say I am a CPU and I'm trying to process food or eat as
some people call it. I can only do as much eating as one mouth can do. If I
could add more mouths, then I could process more. This is what multi-core
processors do. But due to cost constraints among other things, it's not
always possible to take that approach. So, I've got just one mouth. I can use
my hand to pick up the food, bring it to my mouth, then grab another bite while
my mouth is busy. If I finish chewing before my hand is ready to deliver me
more food, however, then my mouth is just sitting there doing nothing. If
only I could use two hands to prepare food for my mouth. Then even though my
mouth can't actually work any faster, I wouldn't waste any time. Oh, wait. I can
do that. That's hyperthreading. One processor and intelligent scheduling to
make sure that it's always working. Pretty awesome, right? Well, usually
hyperthreading can't do much for single threaded workloads where you can only
work on one thing at a time. For example, if you wanted to eat a two
scoop ice cream cone, you can't work on the bottom scoop until the top scoop has
already been consumed. And heaven help you if you try to eat the cone first.
In this example, there is no benefit to adding more mouths or more hands. The
opposite of this would be eating from a bowl of candies. Grabbing and eating a
red candy does not in any way depend on finishing the blue candy that's already
in my mouth. In fact, if I had some friends to help me eat it, we could
consume the candy very quickly by adding more hands and more mouths. This is an
example of a multi-threaded workload, and hyperthreading can definitely help
with this. All right, so let's bring it away from the eating analogy for a
minute and bring it back to the real world. Computing tasks that benefit from
hyperthreading and multiple processing cores are video editing, 3D rendering,
and heavy multitasking on your PC. Video editing is a great example because one
frame of a video can be processed while the next one is queued up because the
video is already shot. The PC doesn't have to guess what's going to be in the
next frame. It already knows. Here's another multitasking example. One
processor can be handling your light tasks like Skype and music playback,
antivirus, and whatever else you have running in the background, while another
one can focus all its attention on running a power- hungry video game in
the foreground. So, with that out of the way, how do you actually choose a
processor for your PC? The first thing I hope you got out of this is that
whatever task manager might say, hyperthreading is not the same as
doubling your processing course. 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 huge double-digit performance improvements all the way to no
performance improvement at all and in very rare cases even very slightly
decreased performance depending on how the software is optimized. So, it's
important to do your research about the software you'll be running. If the work
you do isn't heavily multi-threaded, then you might do just as well to save
your money and buy a processor that doesn't have hyperthreading. Most games
right now, for example, can't take advantage of more than a couple of
threads. However, if the work you do is heavily multi-threaded, then remember
this general rule. Hyperthreading is better than no hyperthreading, but is
not nearly as good as adding more physical processors. In an ideal world,
lots of physical processors, each with hyperthreading, is where it's at.
Speaking of where it's at, audible.com gives you a free audiobook just for
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That's right, suckers. I recorded this before I left and now I'm on vacation.
Actually, I'm I'm not on vacation. I'm in Hawaii working, but um you know, I'm
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and getting your free audio book today. This has been another episode of Fast as
Possible here on TechQuicki. Don't forget to subscribe for more videos like
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suggest future topics for fast as possible. And that is exactly why we're
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