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Subject: Re: Odd hyperthreading behavior

Author: Tom Kerrigan

Date: 11:11:24 10/07/03

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On October 06, 2003 at 09:43:55, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On October 06, 2003 at 06:03:21, Tom Kerrigan wrote:
>
>>On October 04, 2003 at 23:42:01, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>
>>>On October 04, 2003 at 21:00:34, Tom Kerrigan wrote:
>>>
>>>>I had the chance to run my program on a dual P4 Xeon (with hyperthreading).
>>>>
>>>>First off, there have been some involved arguments about the design and
>>>>performance of hyperthreading on this board in the past. I'd like to settle one
>>>>argument, namely that single threaded programs do not slow down when
>>>>hyperthreading is on. Actually, my program did slow down by 1.3% but I think
>>>>this is marginal and easily attributed to the scheduler, not hyperthreading.
>>>>
>>>>The odd part is that hyperthreading DOES slow down my program when running 2
>>>>threads. With HT off, my program searches 90% more NPS with a 2nd thread. With
>>>>HT on, it only searches 53% more NPS. The idle time reported by each thread is
>>>>low and the nodes are split evenly, so it seems both processors are slowed down
>>>>equally. What must be happening is that HT is activated some (or all?) of the
>>>>time while searching but I have no idea what might be activating it.
>>>
>>>
>>>Your explanation is not very clear.  You have a dual.  Did you run two
>>>threads with HT on?  Which means that the two threads might run on two
>>
>>With it on and off. I think I made that pretty clear in my post.
>
>Yes, but you didn't quite make it clear about how you ran the test.  IE I
>_think_ you ran two threads on a machine with SMT off, then two threads on
>a machine with SMT on.  That invites the problem I have discussed here many

Right. That's pretty clear to me from:

"With HT off, my program searches 90% more NPS with a 2nd thread. With HT on, it
only searches 53% more NPS."

>times, that no current O/S (except for a windows .net kernel or a linux

You keep saying Windows .NET but there is no such thing. I think that's what
Windows Server 2003 was going to be called for a while. Do you mean that? Well,
in any case, I might as well be using whatever kernel that is.

-Tom



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