What is Hyper Threading Technology as Fast As Possible
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2014-05-07
·
953 words · ~4 min read
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Hyperthreading technology from Intel has been on their computer processors for
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over 10 years. And yet, much like the
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elusive fox, most people know very little about what it says. Let's start
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with an analogy. Let's say I am a CPU and I'm trying to process food or eat as
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some people call it. I can only do as much eating as one mouth can do. If I
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could add more mouths, then I could process more. This is what multi-core
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processors do. But due to cost constraints among other things, it's not
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always possible to take that approach. So, I've got just one mouth. I can use
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my hand to pick up the food, bring it to my mouth, then grab another bite while
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my mouth is busy. If I finish chewing before my hand is ready to deliver me
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more food, however, then my mouth is just sitting there doing nothing. If
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only I could use two hands to prepare food for my mouth. Then even though my
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mouth can't actually work any faster, I wouldn't waste any time. Oh, wait. I can
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do that. That's hyperthreading. One processor and intelligent scheduling to
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make sure that it's always working. Pretty awesome, right? Well, usually
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hyperthreading can't do much for single threaded workloads where you can only
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work on one thing at a time. For example, if you wanted to eat a two
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scoop ice cream cone, you can't work on the bottom scoop until the top scoop has
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already been consumed. And heaven help you if you try to eat the cone first.
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In this example, there is no benefit to adding more mouths or more hands. The
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opposite of this would be eating from a bowl of candies. Grabbing and eating a
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red candy does not in any way depend on finishing the blue candy that's already
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in my mouth. In fact, if I had some friends to help me eat it, we could
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consume the candy very quickly by adding more hands and more mouths. This is an
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example of a multi-threaded workload, and hyperthreading can definitely help
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with this. All right, so let's bring it away from the eating analogy for a
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minute and bring it back to the real world. Computing tasks that benefit from
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hyperthreading and multiple processing cores are video editing, 3D rendering,
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and heavy multitasking on your PC. Video editing is a great example because one
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frame of a video can be processed while the next one is queued up because the
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video is already shot. The PC doesn't have to guess what's going to be in the
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next frame. It already knows. Here's another multitasking example. One
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processor can be handling your light tasks like Skype and music playback,
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antivirus, and whatever else you have running in the background, while another
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one can focus all its attention on running a power- hungry video game in
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the foreground. So, with that out of the way, how do you actually choose a
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processor for your PC? The first thing I hope you got out of this is that
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whatever task manager might say, hyperthreading is not the same as
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doubling your processing course. It's basically a clever trick for more
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efficient scheduling of the work that is done by the processing cores that you
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have. It also increases power consumption and heat output a little
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bit, but the benefits usually outweigh this drawback. In the real world, you
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can get huge double-digit performance improvements all the way to no
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performance improvement at all and in very rare cases even very slightly
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decreased performance depending on how the software is optimized. So, it's
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important to do your research about the software you'll be running. If the work
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you do isn't heavily multi-threaded, then you might do just as well to save
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your money and buy a processor that doesn't have hyperthreading. Most games
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right now, for example, can't take advantage of more than a couple of
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threads. However, if the work you do is heavily multi-threaded, then remember
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this general rule. Hyperthreading is better than no hyperthreading, but is
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not nearly as good as adding more physical processors. In an ideal world,
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lots of physical processors, each with hyperthreading, is where it's at.
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Speaking of where it's at, audible.com gives you a free audiobook just for
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setting up a new account. And if you use the audible.com/Linus
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link below me, then it makes me look pretty good. They've got over 150,000
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books with everything from fiction to self-help to business. I checked out The
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Four Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferris, which is why I am in Hawaii right now.
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That's right, suckers. I recorded this before I left and now I'm on vacation.
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Actually, I'm I'm not on vacation. I'm in Hawaii working, but um you know, I'm
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taking a few days to not work while I'm there. So, you know, yeah, YouTube's a
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tough gig, but you can help by heading over to audible.com/Linus
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and getting your free audio book today. This has been another episode of Fast as
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Possible here on TechQuicki. Don't forget to subscribe for more videos like
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this. And if you check out the other link in the video description, you can
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suggest future topics for fast as possible. And that is exactly why we're
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doing this one about hyperthreading. So many people requested it. So we do read
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them and we do