On Monday 29 May 2006 09:36, Tim Blechmann wrote:
hyperthreading limits the cpu utilization by simulating two processors with 50% of the speed of the whole cpu. it is very unlikely that the gui process takes as much cpu as the pd process. so in a not very unlikely case, one virtual processor, running the main pd process, will have a utilization of 100%, while the other virtual processor is more or less sleeping ...
This is not true. A single thread is allowed to use the full power of the CPU. It's just that if/when it gets pipeline stalled, misses cache etc., another thread can use up its 'wasted' cycles/execution units.
HT can though slow a system down because of various pipeline wierdnesses and an operating system's SMP code not being up to scratch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_multithreading
robert.