Accelenation have thrown up a new guide, which looks at the Performance of Hyper-Threading on Intel's new Prescott processors!
When Intel broke the 3 GHz barrier with their Northwood 3.06 GHz processor, the model was more than just a speed bump to 3 GHz. In addition to breaking the 3 GHz barrier, Intel threw in an extra incentive to help boost performance. The incentive came in the form of Hyper-Threading. Once only found in Xeon (Prestonia and newer) MP and DP processors, the technology was slowly trickling down to the mainstream market. Following Intel?s last spring time product refresh were a whole new line-up of Hyper-Threading equipped processors ranging from 2.4-3 GHz.
For the most part, Hyper-Threading offered an increase of around 5% in applications that were optimized for SMP (Symmetrical Multi Processing). Most people attributed the minimal performance gain due to the P4?s small 512k L2 cache that had to be split between two threads. Now that Prescott has launched with double the L1 and L2 cache, was cache necessarily the issue?
Prescott Hyper-Threading Examined
When Intel broke the 3 GHz barrier with their Northwood 3.06 GHz processor, the model was more than just a speed bump to 3 GHz. In addition to breaking the 3 GHz barrier, Intel threw in an extra incentive to help boost performance. The incentive came in the form of Hyper-Threading. Once only found in Xeon (Prestonia and newer) MP and DP processors, the technology was slowly trickling down to the mainstream market. Following Intel?s last spring time product refresh were a whole new line-up of Hyper-Threading equipped processors ranging from 2.4-3 GHz.
For the most part, Hyper-Threading offered an increase of around 5% in applications that were optimized for SMP (Symmetrical Multi Processing). Most people attributed the minimal performance gain due to the P4?s small 512k L2 cache that had to be split between two threads. Now that Prescott has launched with double the L1 and L2 cache, was cache necessarily the issue?
Prescott Hyper-Threading Examined
