HT or Not HT, That is the Question

Simples,

Hyper Threading ON or Hyper Threading OFF

And there is even a poll!!

 

Personally I never liked HT, found it useless in a lot of instances, but most of the time, it does increase performance a bit.

So I guess turn it on? It really depends on what you're doing. Some apps love HT, others hate it...

deltatux

 

but the poll is YOU personally, do you use it or not?

 

I typically only enable HT for benchmarking....but disable for gaming as it provides no benefit in games.

 

HT is an Intel marketing feature that really in the end provides minimal if any performance gains. Furthermore HT was the only real advantage the i7 has over the i5 line. HT means as much today as it did with the Pentium4! I don't even care if my CPU has it or not as it dosen't do anything for me anyways...

 

Mine is disabled in bios4 some reason idk...

why don't u just bench it on/off urself. Best way to test..

 

HT is quite handy if you do high cpu intensive tasks! If not disable it as it adds a few C to your temps..

 

Ummm, AMD doesn't have SMT capable CPUs. They are staunch critics of SMT. I think you're thing about HyperTransport.

Ye, but when it comes to tons of resource being needed, it tends to starve threads from their resources and cause them to stall which degrades performance.

HT also increases latency, though you get them back at throughput. It really depends on the application.

As I've said before in the SMT explanation posts I've done on Guru3D, SMT also poses an extra security risk. If there's an SMT-aware/capable malware that detects a thread with cryptographic keys, it can launch an attack on the same pipeline and steal the cryptographic key and decrypt your information whatever it may be.

deltatux

 

was j/k...lol

 

^ never has happened never will so im not sure why u mentioned something about malware regarding HT ><.. If your into overclocking/benching and run high intensive cpu programs then yes the extra 4 threads 4/8 does help but keep in mind it does add a bit of heat, For games at this stage HT isnt relevant as most games will run fine on Dual cores ><

 

HT shows performance improvements in multi-core aware benchmarks, encoding appls, decoding apps, compression apps, graphics and video editing apps. It is completely pointless for gaming, web-browsing and, word processing though.

 

Turned that sucker right off. I even get higher benches with it off for some reason. Probably cos it allows for higher OCs. HT generates so much extra heat.

 

I have mine on, Might as well have an I5 if you don't use it.

 

Never has happened doesn't mean never will. No one thought terrorists would hijack jets and slam them into buildings, right?

If there's a security flaw somewhere, someone will abuse it. You're only secure the moment you do a security audit of your systems. Even a few hours after your audit, you can no longer be sure if a system is secure or not anymore.

That's the problem with computer security, things change so fast, someone might find a new hole since we have highly complex machine.

As for CPU intensive tasks, that all depends, if they're all resource intensive, then it's the reverse, they'll suck up all the available bandwidth to the CPU to the point the threads starve out and stalls while it waits for their resource. This increases latency and thus, you find the software slow.

There's no easy way to detect if two resource intensive applications are running in the same SMT core. There's no API written to detect that (doesn't mean there are no SMT-aware applications, just not common).

SMT, the current implementation to split a logical core has always been a "depends on workload" technology, especially on x86. Benchmarking or CPU intensive but not resource intensive applications will run better with SMT on, but there are those workloads which are resource and CPU intensive that is detrimental with SMT on. Then there are most applications which notice no difference at all.

deltatux

 

when I had my i7 I kept it on

 

I keep it off except for benchin'. If games started utilizing the extra threads provided with HT I'd have no problem downclocking to 4GHz and enabling it.

 

HT On Permanently for me

 

You have it, you paid for it, leave it on? lol

Well for me I leave it on so when I cast playing games it takes advantage of the HT but it never bothered me so I leave it on.

 

Didn’t need it, didn’t pay for it.. no advantages for anything I do.

 

HT off cuts heat by a big amount. So if you wanna OC , then HT off will be best to push your CPU further.

Also I was able to push my benches much higher with HT off (even with a possible slight hit to the performance).

For most apps and games, HT off is the way to go.

I would like to see a list of apps that really uses more than 4 threads. I'm sure there are, but just few and far between.