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Subject: Cat scratcher? :)

Author: Aaron Gordon

Date: 12:13:41 03/05/03

Go up one level in this thread


On March 05, 2003 at 11:36:30, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On March 05, 2003 at 02:05:30, Aaron Gordon wrote:
>
>>On March 04, 2003 at 21:57:58, Nolan Denson wrote:
>>
>>>There are no draw backs when looking to get a computer that using
>>>Hyper-Threading. If you do not like the feature you can just simply turn it off.
>>>There are many system on the market that claims to be Hyper Threading enabled.
>>>Intel has a utility program that checks for Hyper Threading ...
>>>
>>>1. You must have the proper CPU's.
>>>2. You must have the proper motherboard.
>>>3. You bios must support it.
>>>4. Your Operating system must support it.
>>>
>>>Once these things are met your system will indicate that Hyper Threading is
>>>enable before booting into the Operating System.
>>>
>>>It is not an indication that you will see when the computer is turned on and the
>>>Bios is posting.
>>>
>>>Soon all of Intel processcor's will have Hyper Threading. So if what you are
>>>using your processor slows down with Hyper Threading, just simply turn it off
>>>via the Bios.
>>
>>How convenient. Have to reboot 20 times per day to turn it on/off just so your
>>applications run optimally. I'll be sticking with the cooler running, faster,
>>and cheaper AMD chips. :)
>
>You don't have to do this.  Just use an SMT aware operating system and just run
>two
>tasks, although I think there is _zero_ chance that a parallel algorithm that
>works with
>two threads on a dual processor will behave _worse_ using two threads on a
>single SMT
>cpu than it does using just one thread.  SMT is not going to _worsen_
>performance,
>particularly if spinlocks and spinwaits are used correctly.  Since most programs
>don't even
>use 'em, it isn't an issue at all.

If you read around you'll see when SMT is enabled it can hurt performance up to
20% just as it helps in some cases up to 20%. Be it SMT or bad programming, it
does it. I dislike P4's anyway (hot, slow, etc) and if there's something that
can potentially hurt it's performance even more.. well, it's time to glue the
cpu to the wall and let the cat use it as a cat scratcher. Thats about all it'd
be worth to me.



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