Intel Developer Forum Fall 2002 - Day 1: May the show begin

Hyper-Threading on the Desktop by Q4

Just as expected, Intel officially announced that Hyper-Threading would be brought to the Pentium 4 processor by the end of this year. Putting two and two together it’s easy to conclude that the technology will be introduced with Intel’s P4 release at the end of this year at 3.06GHz.

Intel did demonstrate some scenarios in which Hyper-Threading improved performance including the following:

Recording live TV (using ATI’s AIW Radeon) while playing Asheron’s Call 2 Beta:

Excel running while cleaning out an Outlook inbox:

Scanning for viruses while opening a Power Point presentation:

Playing back video from a DV camera while encoding it to MPEG-4 on the fly (no audio):

In all four of the above cases, performance was improved on the Hyper-Threading enabled Pentium 4 system over the same system without HT enabled; both systems were identically configured and running at 3.06GHz. Unfortunately what Intel’s demonstration did not characterize is the performance hit that occurs under other situations which can be addressed using some of the methods we outlined in our IDF preview earlier today.

Hyper-Threading is a technology that won’t show its benefits immediately and might end up being left disabled on most desktop systems initially but in the long run it has a great deal of potential for Intel CPUs.