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Subject: Re: Odd hyperthreading behavior

Author: Tom Kerrigan

Date: 18:53:17 10/04/03

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On October 04, 2003 at 21:49:48, Gian-Carlo Pascutto wrote:

>On October 04, 2003 at 21:40:59, Tom Kerrigan wrote:
>
>>(Quick aside: very shortly after HT first came out, a patch for Linux was
>>released to "support" HT--the purpose was not to allow you to use the extra
>>logical processors (because they're transparent to the OS) but to solve exactly
>>the problem you mention.
>
>2.6.x is the first kernel to have improvements in this regard,
>meaning that all normal Linux systems do _not_ have this
>optimization yet.
>
>>I assume Microsoft also made a similar fix and I don't
>>know which versions of Windows have it, but I am running a version of Windows
>>that would.)
>
>You don't know, but you do know?

Well, let's say I have the latest version of Windows.

>>Given that, HT would have to be providing a 50% speedup for my program if it
>>were only running on one processor, which seems unrealistically high, and that
>>also means my program should run 100% faster with 4 threads (vs. 2) but in
>>reality it only runs 15% faster.
>
>I don't get your math.

Put another way, if 2 threads are spending a bunch of time on just 1 processor,
that means the 2nd processor has a bunch of idle processing power. So if I run 4
threads, it should use the extra processing power and run a lot faster, but it
doesn't. The conclusion is that when running 2 threads, each thread gets its own
CPU.

-Tom



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