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View Full Version : Toms Hardware Asks: Do You Want 6 Cores Or 12 Threads?


Andy Dixon
03-26-2010, 11:00 AM
<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hyper-threading-core-i7-980x,2584.html' target='_blank'>http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews...-980x,2584.html</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"Intel first used Hyper-Threading when it introduced the Pentium 4 "Northwood" processor at 3.06 GHz and the Xeon MP "Foster" series in 2002. The proprietary technology's main purpose is to improve processor utilization through increased parallelization. With the latest Core i7-980X and its six physical cores, Hyper-Threading yields 12 logical cores on desktop PCs. This raises the question: how much of the software that you run truly takes advantage of eight or more threads? Is Hyper-Threading good or bad for power efficiency? And wouldn't it make more sense to stay with six physical cores, rather than risking performance hits caused by less-heavily-threaded applications unnecessarily distributing workloads to logical units?"</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/wpt/auto/1269596143.usr11334.jpg" style="border: #d2d2bb 1px solid;" /></p><p>I raised the question a few news posts back about how CPU's are progressing faster than current software's ability to use the power of all these extra cores.&nbsp; Toms Hardware have produced an article asking this exact question, especially as Intel are now releasing their high end chips with Hyper Threading enabled again, giving&nbsp;six core chips an extra&nbsp;six virtual cores.&nbsp; So can software take advantage of all these extra cores? Take a read and see what they conclude.</p>