Didn’t HyperThreading suck with Pentium 4? Why bring it back?
First, you should know that a CPU core can execute only one instruction thread at a time. Since that thread will touch on only some portions of the CPU, resources that are not used sit idle. To address that, Intel introduced consumers to Hyper-Threading beginning with its 3.06GHz Pentium 4 chip. Hyper-Threading, more accurately called simultaneous multi-threading, partitions a CPU’s resources so that multiple threads can be executed at the same time.
In essence, a single-core Pentium 4 appears as two CPUs to the OS. But since it is actually just one core dividing its resources, you don’t get the same performance boost you would receive from adding a second core. Hyper-Threading does, however, generally smooth out multitasking; and in applications that are optimized for multi-threading, you will see a modest performance advantage. The problem is that not all applications were coded for Hyper-Threading when it was released and performance could actually be hindered. Hyper-Threading went away with the Core 2 series of CPUs, but Intel has dusted off the concept for the new Core i7 series because the transistor cost is minimal and the performance benefits stand to be far better than what the Pentium 4 could ever achieve.
