Hyper Threading and M Intel Technology

[Andrew]

Ok I heard that this hyper threading basicly acts as another processor right? (more info)

And then in an ad I see an intel processor with M technology..whats M technology? (it had an M on the P4 label)

Intel user <-- :)

When is pentium 5 coming out? and also what is the max that P4 can go to? (I think p3 was around 1 ghz)

[gryphon]

The difference between a Hyper-Threading processor, whether Xeon or Pentium 4, and a conventional SMP, Symmetric Multi Processing, configuration is that the latter uses two physical, single-threaded processors. The logical processors in a Hyper-Threading processor share certain processor resources such as the execution engine, the floating point unit, the on-board cache and naturally the system bus.

Intell's new processor architecture Prescott might or might not have HT. Although I heard some roumors that they are going to abandon it. [ not shure thought ]

As a DUAL CPU fan myself I'm not really fond of HT as a replacement for the traditionall dual systems. If you should look at the taskmanager of Win2K or WinXP it does show up as a dual [ sorry, I lost the screenshot :-[ ], although the architecture has been shared partially which doesn't make it a "true" dual processor system.

The Pentium 5, I'm not shure about that. Thought the Prescott architecture is due for release somewhere this year .. only not shure if this will be the Pentium 5 or just a new P4 architecture.

The Pentium 4 M is a mobile for laptop computers.

It could also be a part of the Intell Centrino architecture.

More about that can be found here and here at Intel.

[Nyarlathotep]

The Pentium 5 is expected to bereleased in Q3 or 4. The max that a P4 can go to is 3.2Ghz, which just has been released by Intel. However, with the new motherboards (like the Asus P4C800), you can easily overclock your porcessor. I have a 3.06Ghz, but have it 20% overclocked (therefore it's recognized as a 3.6Ghz).

[Timenn]

Hyper threading? Is that the same as multi-threading? (And not task-switching)

For you Intel fans: Check out the AMD vs. Intel thread in Fan Fiction :)

[gryphon]

euh, I wanted to say no.. . but mayby there is a line in them. The things you mention are software [ OS ] related. Defining the way computer processes are being tranferd to the architecture and is handeling different processes internally. Intel's HT is just the hardware.

I think you are refering to processes being time shared fot processor time or just beeing ecexuted ?

Time sharing [ or task switching ] is a certain amount of time being reserved for each process to run, or given time to run in. It has been handy in the past with relativly slow systems, using time sharing every user knew he had time on the machine's CPU to preform a task. As a certain amount of time had been allocated to him. With faster computers this idea became unpractical, not always a user needs the time reserved for him, so it just get's lost. Or some processes had to wait if they couldn't be compleated in the time reserved for one turn so to speak. With faster computers time sharing had been abandond and CPU's [ OS'es ] are better run based on multi threads.

So think the thing you are refering to is more depending on the OS used then the processor type. Most Linux versions of kernel 2.1.6 and above have the suport for Intel's HT, although some of time are still based on time sharing.

Hoped that makes any sence :-