Intel's Hyper-Threading Technology: Free Performance?

Final Words

Although we all got extremely excited when Hyper-Threading was rumored to be on all current Pentium 4/Xeon cores, it will not be the free performance for all that we had wished for. The reasons are simple and the technology has a long way to go before we'll be able to see it and take advantage of it on all platforms, including desktops, but with developer support it definitely can turn out to be a very powerful ally of the Pentium 4, Xeon and future generation Intel processors.

Given today's packaging technology and limitations, Hyper-Threading makes much more sense for the mass market than a dual-core approach such as what AMD is rumored to be considering for the higher-end Sledge Hammer CPUs. Until technologies such as Bumpless Build-Up Layer packaging can be perfected, the costs associated with producing a multi-core CPU may be too high for more than a very small portion of the market.

It's interesting to note how different AMD and Intel have become over the years. From the days of manufacturing essentially clones of Intel CPUs to taking a drastically different approach to the future of workstation and server CPUs, AMD has come a very long way indeed. If the higher-end Sledge Hammer CPUs do end up featuring two cores it will promise much higher performance than Hyper-Threading can offer because of the fact that there will be double the execution units thus avoiding some of the problems we have addressed today. Again, the biggest downside being the manufacturing of such a chip; we have explained in the past the perils of producing complicated CPUs.

Hyper-Threading will be absent from the desktop market for a while but given proper developer support it can easily become yet another technology that makes its way down from the server level to the desktop level.