Hyper-threading officially called Hyper-Threading Technology or HT Technology and abbreviated as HTT or HT is Intel 's proprietary simultaneous multithreading SMT implementation used to improve parallelization of computations doing multiple tasks at once performed on x86 microprocessors.
It was introduced on Xeon server processors in February and on Pentium 4 desktop processors in November For each processor core that is physically present, the operating system addresses two virtual logical cores and shares the workload between them when possible.
The main function of hyper-threading is to increase the number of independent instructions in the pipeline; it takes advantage of superscalar architecture, in which multiple instructions operate on separate data in parallel. With HTT, one physical core appears as two processors to the operating system, allowing concurrent scheduling of two processes per core.
In addition, two or more processes can use the same resources: If resources for one process are not available, then another process can continue if its resources are available. In addition to requiring simultaneous multithreading support in the operating system, hyper-threading can be properly utilized only with an operating system specifically optimized for it.
Hyper-Threading Technology is a form of simultaneous multithreading technology introduced by Intel, while the concept behind the technology has been patented by Sun Microsystems. Architecturally, a processor with Hyper-Threading Technology consists of two logical processors per core, each of which has its own processor architectural state.
Each logical processor can be individually halted, interrupted or directed to execute a specified thread, independently from the other logical processor sharing the same physical core. Unlike a traditional dual-processor configuration that uses two separate physical processors, the logical processors in a hyper-threaded core share the execution resources.
These resources include the execution engine, caches, and system bus interface; the sharing of resources allows two logical processors to work with each other more efficiently, and allows a logical processor to borrow resources from a stalled logical core assuming both logical cores are associated with the same physical core.
A processor stalls when it is waiting for data it has sent for so it can finish processing the present thread. The degree of benefit seen when using a hyper-threaded or multi core processor depends on the needs of the software, and how well it and the operating system are written to manage the processor efficiently.
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 the usual "physical" processor and an extra " logical " processor to the host operating system HTT-unaware operating systems see two "physical" processorsallowing the operating system to schedule two threads or processes simultaneously and appropriately.
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 missbranch mispredictionor 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 vad menas med hyper threading operating system's thread scheduler is unaware of hyper-threading, it will treat all four logical processors 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 the same physical processor; that processor would become extremely busy while the other would remain idle, leading to poorer performance than is possible by scheduling the threads onto different physical processors.
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.
The first published paper describing what is now known as hyper-threading in a general purpose computer was written by Edward S.