I have an i3 2100, Im liking it too.. Can anyone explain hyperthreading? Dont have time till this eve to visit the university of google.
Am I correct in thinking that an i5 will show up as 6 cores then?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading
Hyper-threading (officially Hyper-Threading Technology or HT Technology, abbreviated HTT or HT) is Intel's term for its simultaneous multithreading implementation first appearing in February 2002 on its Xeon server processors and in November 2002 on its Pentium 4 desktop CPUs.[1] Later, Intel included this technology in Itanium, Atom, and Core 'i' Series CPUs, among others.
Intel's proprietary HT Technology is used to improve parallelization of computations (doing multiple tasks at once) performed on PC microprocessors. For each processor core that is physically present, the operating system addresses two virtual or logical cores, and shares the workload between them when possible. The main function of hyper-threading is to decrease the number of dependent instructions on the pipeline.
Hyper-threading requires not only that the operating system support multiple processors, but also that it be specifically optimized for HTT,[2] and Intel recommends disabling HTT when using operating systems that have not been optimized for this chip feature.
Hyper-threading works by duplicating certain sections of the processor—those that store the architectural state—but not duplicating the main execution resources. This allows a hyper-threading processor to appear as two "logical" processors to the host operating system, allowing the operating system to schedule two threads or processes simultaneously. When execution resources would not be used by the current task in a processor without hyper-threading, and especially when the processor is stalled, a hyper-threading equipped processor can use those execution resources to execute another scheduled task. (The processor may stall due to a cache miss, branch misprediction, or data dependency.)
This technology is transparent to operating systems and programs. The minimum that is required to take advantage of hyper-threading is symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) support in the operating system, as the logical processors appear as standard separate processors.
It is possible to optimize operating system behavior on multi-processor hyper-threading capable systems. For example, consider an SMP system with two physical processors that are both hyper-threaded (for a total of four logical processors). If the operating system's thread scheduler is unaware of hyper-threading it will treat all four processors as being the same. If only two threads are eligible to run, it might choose to schedule those threads on the two logical processors that happen to belong to one of the physical processors; that processor would become extremely busy while the other would be idle, leading to poorer performance than is possible with better scheduling. This problem can be avoided by improving the scheduler to treat logical processors differently from physical processors; in a sense, this is a limited form of the scheduler changes that are required for NUMA systems.
if a single core supports hyperthreading it will look like a dual core in windows (original HT P4's did that)
if a dual core has HT it show up as a 4 core in windows and if a 4 core has HT it will show up as an 8 Core processor
