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Hyper-Threading Technology
Embedded Systems Design (ESD) / Hagenberg
Michael Bogner
Hyper-Threading Technology (HT Technology) (1)

Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology (HT Technology) is supported by specific

members of the Intel Pentium 4 and Xeon processor families. The technology
enables software to take advantage of task-level, or thread-level parallelism by
providing multiple logical processors within a physical processor package. In its
first implementation in Intel Xeon processor, Hyper-Threading Technology makes a
single physical processor appear as two logical processors.

Fig 1: A CPU with HT Technology Fig 2: A Dual-Core CPU with two

uses just on ALU processor cores (without HT)

The two logical processors each have a complete set of architectural registers (see
Fig 1) while sharing one single physical processor’s resources. By maintaining the
architecture state of two processors, an HT Technology capable processor looks like
two processors to software, including operating system and application code. By
sharing resources needed for peak demands between two logical processors, HT
Technology is well suited for multiprocessor systems to provide an additional
performance boost in throughput when compared to traditional MP systems.

Each logical processor can execute a software thread, allowing a maximum of two
software threads to execute simultaneously on one physical processor. The two
software threads execute simultaneously, meaning that in the same clock cycle an
“add” operation from logical processor 0 and another “add” operation and load
from logical processor 1 can be executed simultaneously by the execution engine.

Quelle: Intel Corp

Hyper-Threading Technology (HT Technology) (2)

In the first implementation of HT Technology, the physical execution resources are

shared and the architecture state is duplicated for each logical processor. This
minimizes the die area cost of implementing HT Technology while still achieving
performance gains for multithreaded applications or multitasking workloads.

Compared to the Dual-Core Architecture the performance of processors with HT

Technology is lower, as expected (see Fig 3). Single Threaded Application will get no
performance gain with both technics, as there has to be parallelism to take
advantage of this architecture.

Fig 3: Speed-up of Single and Multi-thread video encoding applications

running on a dual core processor and alternatively on an processor
with Hyperthreading Technology

Quelle: Intel Corp