Aqua-Soft Forums

[HELP] need answers on hyber threading!!

i' ve a couple of questiones that i need to be answered badly for an exam paper and i thought you guys might help ;)

1- With the appearance of hyper threading there will be programs made specially for full use of its high performance qualities...are the programs we use now compatable with this technology?

2- Will this technology affect devices attached to pc like printers , scanners..etc,.?

thanks in advance :D

#219217

1-yes

2-nope

#219221

I was going to write a long, wordy answer to your questions, but most of my points are discussed in this article on Ars Technica (which I recommend reading).

In short, though:

  1. Yes and no. They will run on hyperthreading-enabled hardware, but won't necessarily use hyperthreading to it's fullest. That said, many applications (Office, and lots of other WinForm apps) will handle HT just fine, due to the existence of SMP-enabled systems. See the link above for more info.
  2. Probably not. Scheduling of modern OSes pretty much keeps these sorts of devices maxed out as it is.

#219223

Just a note on how programs will be "written" for HT:

A program shouldn't have to really be written for multi-proc. The only thing needed to take advantage of it would be a properly threaded app (which is important even on uni-proc machines). It is the OS that has to write the proper code to handle MP (placing the threads on separate processors for true multitasking). The App shouldn't care what kind of machine it's on (ideally).

So you have three levels right now. One is the OS doesn't have any MP support or the app isn't threaded at all. This will pretty much take advantage of one processor (for just that app). Then you have an OS that's MP aware, but just treats an HT proc like normal SMP (linux 2.4). That will give you a speedup, but not as much as if the kernel actually recognizes the HT as HT and optimizes specifically for it (it works a bit differently than SMP). Linux 2.6 does this, and there are a bunch of speedups. I have no idea how Windows treats HT.

HT is a hacked up version of a dual core processor. It is essentially multi-processor on one chip, just with some things like shared cache. Your question sounds like marketing speak.

#219259

Photoshop handles HT great, it's multiprocessor enabled. Also... most custom bootscreens won't load correctly as XP with a HT system loads a multiprocessor kernal at boot.

#219279

thanks alot guys

#219435