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Hyper-Threading Enabled on Intel's Kaby Lake Pentium CPUs

posted by mrpg on Friday January 13 2017, @12:50PM   Printer-friendly
from the 8-is-enough dept.

takyon writes:

Some of Intel's cheapest dual-core CPUs will now have four threads enabled rather than just two, in what may be a move to compete with AMD's upcoming Ryzen CPUs, which all have two threads per core:

The Pentium series traditionally consists of low-power, dual-core offerings with no [Hyper-Threading (HT)]. Pentiums serve as the low-end alternative to the i3 series, which features dual-core offerings with HT enabled. The addition of HT to the Pentium series expands its range, but there are still a few key differentiators compared to the i3 series.

[...] The HT-enabled Pentiums create a challenge to AMD's line of low-end processors, and of course, some will speculate that it appears that Intel is bolstering its low-end products in the face of AMD's pending Ryzen onslaught. In either case, the HT-powered Pentiums add a welcome new wrinkle to the low end. The processors are listed on Intel's ARK but are currently available only for preorder.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 14 2017, @01:12AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 14 2017, @01:12AM (#453652)

    I'm not sure what your particular application is, but I don't think you really need that.

    I used to use a dual-core atom netbook (without HT), and was able to wring substantial performance increases out of mplayer with a script that used cgroup shenanigans to lock mplayer on cpu0, and left everything else to fight over cpu1, then put everything back on both cores on exit. (There was also a bit where it copied the video file to a tmpfs ram drive, to keep background I/O to the SD card from causing stuttering, but that's irrelevant here.) I think a HT CPU should show up as 4 CPUs in software, and so you could do similar tricks to run everything on cpu0 and cpu2 (I think... or is it 0 and 1?) in software, while keeping each core's second/virtual thread idle.

    But unless you actually have two specific processes/threads you want to maximize at all costs, I think a better approach would be to lock one process at a time (the currently-important one, as in my mplayer script) to one half-core, nothing on the matching half-core, and leave everything else to both halves of the other core.

  • (Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday January 14 2017, @08:00AM

    by sjames (2882) on Saturday January 14 2017, @08:00AM (#453736) Journal

    In Linux, at least, HT is handled exactly like that.