Hyper Threating Technology A Must or Optional?

Hi I was wondering if a motherboard that i am buying supports hyper threatig technology does the CPU have to have this or is it optional.

Thanks in advance,
Jack

 

......Hyperthreading kind of died with the Pentium 4...

 

so you are saying that even though the motherboard supports it. The CPU does not have to?

 

No!! It's back~!!

From wikipedia:

Older Pentium 4 based CPUs use Hyper-Threading, but the current-generation Pentium M based cores Merom, Conroe, and Woodcrest do not. Hyper-Threading is a specialized form of simultaneous multithreading (SMT), which has been said to be on Intel's plans for the generation after Merom, Conroe and Woodcrest.

More recently Hyper-Threading has been criticised as being energy inefficient. For example, specialist low-power CPU design company ARM has stated SMT can use up to 46% more power than dual CPU designs. Furthermore, they claim SMT increases cache thrashing by 42%, whereas dual core results in a 37% decrease[1]. These considerations are claimed to be the reason Intel dropped SMT from the following microarchitecture.

The Intel Atom is an in-order single-core processor with Hyper-Threading, for low power mobile PCs and low-price desktop PCs.

Intel has released Nehalem(Core i7) on November 2008 in which Hyper-Threading makes a return. Nehalem is projected to contain up to 8 cores and will be able to effectively scale 16+ threads.

 

i see no reason to not to enable it. sometimes in some very specific cases, you can loose a bit of performance. but the gain of having another thread there to update low-cpu tasks far outweights it. (like having a snappy ui while having some 100% cpu computation running).

espencially on the atom, it helps quite a bit. on nehalem, too.

having an atom 330, a dual core with 2 hyperthreads each, results in a great low-work server cpu. always snappy reacting. while it can't do very much, it's just "allways there for you".

I don't think ARMs statement is true in any way. The Atom wouldn't have hyperthreading else.

 

hi thanks for all the responses. i was just wondering if the main question could be answered sometime...
IS THE HYPER THREADING TECHNOLOGY A MUST OR OPTIONAL ON THE CPU SINCE TEH MOTEHR BOARD SUPPORTS IT (OR HAS IT)??

 

it's optional. the cpu doesn't have to have it. but if it does have it, you can enable or disable it in the bios.

should be optional the other way, too. means if you have a cpu that can do it, but a motherboard that can't, hyperthreading won't work, but the pc should still work.

if cpu + mainboard + os + you support it, it works.
if not, it won't work, but the pc still works.

 

Pentium 4 had a architectural "flaw" you might say that degraded HT performance way too much. But the Core microarchitecture derivatives like Nehalem doesn't and even in servers will be much more widely used than P4 based Xeons ever did.

Atom will gain a lot because of its in order + 2 issue nature.

 

If your cpu supports hyperthreading, it also supports running without it.
In every P4 HT system I have had, you could disable hyperthreading in the BIOS.

K-TRON

 

From my Samsung NC10 review:

Atom N270 without hyperthreading: wPrime 32M = 176s

Atom N270 with hyperthreading: wPrime 32M = 126s

John