Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “What is Hyper Threading Technology as Fast As Possible”.
Hyper-Threading technology from Intel has been on their computer processors for over 10 years and yet much like the elusive Fox, most people know very little about what it says. Let’S start with an analogy: let’s say I am a CPU and I’m trying to process food or eat, as some people call it. I can only do as much eating as one mouth can do if I could add more mouths than I could process more. This is what multi-core processors do, but due to cost constraints, among other things, it’s not always possible to take that approach.
So I’ve got just one mouth. I can use my hand to pick up the food bring it to. My mouth then grab another bite, while my mouth is busy. If I finish chewing before my hand is ready to deliver me more food. However, then my mouth is just sitting there doing nothing. If only I could use two hands to prepare food for my mouth, then, even though my mouth can’t actually work any faster, I wouldn’t waste any time. Oh wait. I can do that. That’S hyper-threading one processor and intelligent scheduling to make sure that it’s always working pretty awesome right. Well, usually, hyper-threading can’t do much for single threaded workloads where you can only work on one thing at a time. For example, if you wanted to eat a two scoop ice cream cone, you can’t work on the bottom scoop until the top scoop has already been consumed and heaven help you if you try to eat the cone first. In this example, there is no benefit to adding more mouths or more hands. The opposite of this would be eating from a bowl of candies grabbing and eating a red candy does not in any way depend on finishing the blue candy, that’s already in my mouth.
In fact, if I had some friends to help me eat it, we could consume the candy very quickly by adding more hands and more mouths. This is an example of a multi-threaded workload, and hyper-threading can definitely help with this all right. So, let’s bring it away from the eating analogy for a minute and bring it back to the real-world computing tasks that benefit from hyper threading and multiple processing cores are video editing, 3d rendering and heavy multitasking on your PC. Video editing is a great example, because one frame of a video can be well.
The next one is queued up, because the video is already shot the PC doesn’t have to guess. What’S going to be in the next frame, it already knows. Here’S another multitasking example. One processor can be handling your light tasks like Skype and music playback antivirus and whatever else you have running in the background, while another one can focus all its attention on running a power-hungry video game in the foreground.
So with that out of the way, how do you actually choose a processor for your PC? The first thing I hope you got out of this – is that whatever task manager might say, hyper threading is not the same as doubling your processing course. It’S basically a clever trick for more efficient scheduling of the work that is done by the processing course that you have. It also increases power, consumption and heat output a little bit, but the benefits usually outweigh this drawback in the real world.
You can get huge double-digit performance improvements, all the way to no performance improvement at all and, in very rare cases, even very slightly decreased performance depending on how the software is optimized. So it’s important to do your research about the software you’ll be running. If the work you do isn’t heavily multi-threaded, then you might do just as well to save your money and buy a processor that doesn’t have hyper threading. Most games right now, for example, can take advantage of more than a couple of threads. However, if the work you do is heavily multi-threaded them remember this general rule, hyper threading is better than no hyper threading, but is not nearly as good as adding more physical processors. In an ideal world lots of physical processors, each with hyper threading, is where it’s at speaking of where it’s at audible.com gives you a free audiobook just for setting up a new account, and if you use the audible.com, slash Linus link below me, then it makes me. Look pretty good they’ve got over 150,000 books with everything from fiction to self-help to business. I checked out the 4-hour workweek by Timothy Ferriss, which is why I am in Hawaii right now. That’S right! Suckers! I recorded this before I left and now I’m on vacation.
Actually, I’m not on vacation, I’m in Hawaii working, but you know I’m taking a few days to not work on there. So you know yeah YouTube’s a tough gig, but you can help by heading over to audible.com and getting your free audiobook today. This has been another episode of fast as possible here on tech. Quickie, don’t forget to subscribe for more videos like this and if you check out the other link in the video description, you can suggest future topics for fast as possible, and that is exactly why we’re doing this one about hyper-threading. So many people requested it. So we do read them and we do listen.
.