How does Windows utilize Hyperthreaded cores? - The Workshop
How does Windows utilize Hyperthreaded cores? - The Workshop
2016-03-08
hyper-threading is a feature that's been
on high-end Intel CPUs for a long time
but has often been misunderstood by the
community almost as a whole today we're
going to check out how actually it works
on a Windows level how applications are
interacting with it and what happens
when you put load on actual threads
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many people are vaguely aware that hyper
threading improves performance of
certain applications by making one CPU
core behave as - so it can split the
workload up more effectively but how
does it work exactly many people seem to
assume that there's a difference between
real cores and hyper threaded cores I
mean it makes sense right once you get
into your system Windows is going to c8
if you have eight hyper threaded cores
and then some of them will probably be
weaker than others is that really how it
works
I mean Intel's own specs could be a bit
confusing core i7s usually have four and
then in brackets eight listed is their
number of cores does that mean that
there are four subordinate cores or
something are the four extra cores
weaker to start answering things instead
of just repeatedly asking questions for
the entire video open up device manager
on any system that has an i7 in it or a
hyper threaded CPU you'll see that all
of the cores in the current case of this
system the 4790k it displays eight CPUs
all of which show is the same thing
that's because there is eight logical
cores in the system when you read Intel
spec sheet before is for physical cores
the eight is for what those physical
cores result in which is eight logical
course that doesn't mean you have 12
cores that doesn't mean you have eight
cores physically that means you have
four cores physically and eight cores
logically different things they don't
add together very different things
so how do these cores actually behave to
find out we use unread to set up to
Windows virtual machines we assigned
each VM four logical cores out of eight
total then we ran some benchmarks to see
if Windows actually cares well which
logical core it's using and to see if
there's any preference between them if
one of them is actually better than the
other one some people on forums seem to
be under the impression that half of
them like zero one two and three in
terms of cores are real cores on half of
them four five six and seven are just
the extra hyper threads so we're going
to see how that works
results showed virtually no difference
Senate bench got between 620 and 625 per
VM when we ran them separately when we
ran them both at the same time they both
got exactly 383 so it looks like there
is a bit of a performance hit even
though the VM completely separates its
logical cores but at the end of the day
the performance was the same similar
story on city skylines which is a fairly
CPU bound game both got 48 fps when
running separately with the performance
dropping to 35 and 31 we ran them at the
same time so there was the difference
but not a huge one and due to city
skylines not being our most consistent
benchmark it might come down to just
slightly differences within the game we
looked at it much more deeply with 7-zip
running it simultaneously on both VMs
gave nearly identical results between 11
K and 12 K MIPS but when we ran it on
just one it jumped to 17 k2 or 18 K mips
starting one first and then starting the
other one a while later while it was
running
allowed us to see this balancing in
real-time it was interesting to watch as
the processes were running the one you
started first would be running faster at
the beginning but over time they would
start to equal out and it didn't
actually take that long these results
seemed to make sense as hyper-threading
works by sending threads to whatever the
physical core actually has free to
process instructions it doesn't split
the physical cores into two things and
leave the other half unutilized so if
you have just one thing running it will
perform better than if you have two
running what's actually happening is
that Windows can schedule two different
threads on one physical core at the same
time if the physical core is working on
the first task but still has some
resources free it can go ahead and use
its remaining resources to process the
second task so you won't always have a
clean doubling or halving of performance
if you're running one thing versus two
but you will see substantial performance
differences if you're leveraging the
hyper threading feature on a physical
core but there is no real distinction to
draw between the logs
cores on a hyper-threading cpu they're
all the same thing both physically and
how a hyper-threading aware OS like
Windows 10 sees them so no it's not the
same thing as having eight physical
cores like at all but it can be a good
way to make sure your CPU cycles don't
go to waste
hopefully that was interesting I'm sure
there will be more questions basically
the gist of it is you don't have eight
cores but you have a much more effective
way to utilize the four that you do have
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