What is hyperthreading?

Surely you have ever heard of the HyperThreading technology of different modern processors, such as Intel Core, but what exactly is HyperThreading? We will try to explain it in the next lines and also make a bit of history, because this technology is not new.

What is HyperThreading?

HyperThreading technology consists of 'simulating' two processors (or cores) in one, dividing the workload between them and therefore improving the processing speed. Here the saying " two heads think more than one" perfectly applies a logic that Intel has long implemented in its processors.

Today we can see processors of 2, 4, 6 or 8 physical Intel cores, which thanks to HyperThreading technology, can simulate twice as many processing cores. For example, Intel Core i3 processors have only two physical cores but it behaves as if it had 4 cores (they really are THREADS) thanks to this technology. These additional cores that HyperThreading simulates are often called 'logical cores' .

This feature is present in the entire Intel Core, Intel Core M and Intel Core Xeon family.

HyperThreading in daily use

A computer or a mobile phone is currently a multi-tasking device that performs several operations at the same time. We can watch a movie and do a system scan for viruses or play a video game and download the full Black Mirror series. This is only what the user can see but a computer performs many more tasks in the background without realizing it. They are common tasks that we do every day, with more cores of processing a computer can do all this and more without losing performance.

The evolution of this technology

The first time Intel implemented this technology was with the well-remembered Intel Pentium IV processors (Northwood), which at that time promised a performance improvement of between 15 and 30% if we had it activated consuming only 5% more.

This first approach to HyperThreading technology was somewhat bittersweet, since the software of that time (we are talking about 2001) was not too prepared for this type of feature, so in Windows 2000 or earlier operating systems we could suffer from a crash of performance, so we had to disable it through the BIOS of our motherboard.

After a pause of several years, HyperThreading technology returned with the Intel Core i3, i5 and i7 of the Westmere architecture (2010) and did it to remain with excellent results in multi-threaded tasks that pulverized in performance the proposals of AMD.

AMD's alternative

Although Intel pioneered its HyperThreading technology, AMD has also implemented something similar in its processors from the Bulldozer architecture. AMD for its part called it CMT (Cluster Based Multithreading) which does exactly the same thing but does not work in a similar way to Intel's proposal.

What CMT technology does is integrate two cores in a single block, but it does not replicate the floating point unit, which is shared by the two cores. That is, that new superblock will have two units to perform operations with integers and only one for floating point operations.

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The CMT technology of AMD processors (FX series and others) will soon be replaced by SMT (Simultaneous Multi-Threading) which will be included in the new Ryzen. The difference with CMT introduced in Bulldozer is that it could execute two threads that were identical, with SMT two threads per core could be executed but totally independent. Which we will see a great evolution with respect to the already "obsolete" Intel.

I hope this article has resolved your doubts and I invite you to read our guide on The best processors on the market.