Hyper-Threading Impressions

Hyper-Threading Requirements

As far as we know, Intel has no plans to add Hyper-Threading technology to its older stable of processors. But Intel has been known to heed the demands of its OEM customers. Just as the market wanted Pentium 4 variants in 100MHz increments and Northwood processors at clock speeds below 2GHz (contrary to Intel’s initial plans), it’s possible that Intel’s current plans may change. When you consider the slump that the PC market is currently in, we wouldn’t be surprised if a buzzword like “Hyper-Threading” is just too tempting for Intel and its partners to pass up. After all, everyone still remembers the MMX craze. Motherboard manufacturers in particular would love to get the early Pentium 4 adopters to move on up to a motherboard that supports the world of Hyper-Threading. Inexpensive processors that support Hyper-Threading can make this happen.

For now though the official company line is that you’ll need a processor at 3.06GHz or higher.

Besides the proper processor, your motherboard will have to be based on a chipset that supports Hyper-Threading technology. Fortunately, all existing 533MHz chipsets from Intel (with the exclusion of 845G chipsets that utilize Intel’s A-stepping) support Hyper-Threading. 845PE in particular supports this technology right out of the box. If your motherboard is based on the 845E or 850E chipset, you’ll need to download the latest BIOS for your motherboard in order to obtain the technology.

As far as third-party chipsets are concerned, the VIA P4X400 also supports Hyper-Threading, although some of the earlier motherboards that hit the market may require a BIOS update. VIA’s P4PB Ultra we reviewed last week supported Hyper-Threading out of the box. In contrast, none of the SiS 648 motherboards we’ve tested supported the technology and SiS has been mum on words to date. We’ve heard rumors that a new stepping of the chipset will be required, if that’s true current owners of SiS 648 motherboards are out of luck.

The final piece of the Hyper-Threading equation is operating system support. As of right now, operating systems based on Linux kernel 2.4.18 (or higher), Windows XP Home and Windows XP Professional are the only ones supported. Since it supports multi-threaded applications, Windows 2000 will show some performance benefits, but for optimal performance the OS must support the technology natively.

Hyper-Threading Performance

First off, as it stands now Hyper-Threading will not increase your frame rate in games. At least it won’t when the only application you’re running is a game. In all of our tests the performance difference was barely over a percentage point, in most cases it was less than that. However, if you’re the type that may wish to encode a video or an MP3, while you’re playing your favorite game, Hyper-Threading can offer a substantial performance benefit. Using Main Concept’s MPEG encoder we converted a 19MB AVI into DiVX format in 54.7 seconds while Quake 3 benchmarks were running. With Hyper-Threading disabled, the same task took 106.4 seconds.

Even without Quake 3 running simultaneously this conversion was completed more quickly with Hyper-Threading enabled -- 46.5 seconds with Hyper-Threading versus 52.5 without Hyper-Threading. Of course, most of you probably won’t be encoding files while gaming but we could see this coming in handy for the audio/video enthusiast who would like to work on his family reunion video while getting a little bit of work done in Adobe Photoshop.

In another test, we ran SETI@home in the background while testing with Unreal Tournament 2003. In this environment, we actually found that the system ran over 30% slower when Hyper-Threading was enabled.

Finally, we conducted tests with Business Winstone 2002, to see if it would see some benefit from Hyper-Threading technology. But again the performance difference was negligible, 33.4 WinMarks with Hyper-Threading enabled versus 33.2 with the feature turned off.