What does Hyper-threading in CPU mean?

As we all know, CPU a.k.a Central Processing Unit is the brain of our computer and does all the computational works. As the technology grows rapidly, the CPU now comes equipped with multiple cores and Hyper-threading.

Generally, a CPU performs better when it has multiple cores or hyper-threading done when compared to a single-core CPU of the same speed without hyper-threading.

What is Hyperthreading?

Back in 2002, this concept was introduced by Intel on desktop CPUs with the Pentium 4 HT. As the Pentium 4 had just a single CPU core, it cannot perform multi-tasking. In order to overcome that, Hyper-threading allows the two logical CPU cores to share physical execution resources. This helps the system to speed things up, but it is not as good as having multiple cores.

Moreover, the hyperthreading performance improvements are highly application-dependent, whereas some of the applications might see performance degradation with it because many processor resources are shared between logical processors.

Uses of hyperthreading

When the hyper-threading is enabled, each logical processor is able to act independently and can be interrupted, halted and operated separately from the other virtual processor sharing the same core.

During this process, when one logical core is idle, the other core can take over the additional execution resources from the other logical core.

Hyperthreading allows the processor to work on more tasks or instruction threads in a given time, however, the additional work is constrained by the same execution resources as well.

Hyperthreading is a hardware-based virtualization at the processor hardware level.

While you won't see the difference in day to day usage, the applications most likely to benefit are 3D rendering programs, heavy-duty audio/video transcoding apps, and scientific applications built for maximum multi-threaded performance. You can boost the performance maximum of up to 30%.