Hyper-Threading Technology

Intel processors are superscalar, enabling them to execute more than one instruction per clock cycle. Intel Hyper-Threading technology extends this capability by making a single physical processor appear to be two logical processors that are capable of executing two threads in parallel. From a software perspective, operating systems and programs can schedule processes or threads as if they were running on two physical processors. From a microarchitecture perspective, instructions from two logical processors execute simultaneously on the shared resources of one physical processor, thus increasing overall resource utilization.

Operating environments can take advantage of Hyper-Threading technology in one of two ways:

1. Applications can be multithreaded thus allowing the individual application to execute upon parallel threads in the processor at the same time. Operating systems like Windows .Net* and XP* along with high performance applications such as database engines, scientific computation programs and multimedia design software are currently multithreaded and are typically run in dual- or multi-processor environments.
2. Hyper-Threading can be used in a multitasking environment where the system is running more than one application in parallel. In this instance, each application can be run as separate threads on the same processor increasing utilization of the execution units and overall platform performance.