Gadgetory

hyper-threading technology from Intel has been on their computer processors for over 10 years and yet much like the elusive Fox most people know very little about what it says let's start with an analogy let's say I am a CPU and I'm trying to process food or eat as some people call it I can only do as much eating as one mouth can do if I could add more mouths than I could process more this is what multi-core processors do but due to cost constraints among other things it's not always possible to take that approach so I've got just one mouth I can use my hand to pick up the food bring it to my mouth then grab another bite while my mouth is busy if I finish chewing before my hand is ready to deliver me more food however then my mouth is just sitting there doing nothing if only I could use two hands to prepare food for my mouth then even though my mouth can't actually work any faster I wouldn't waste any time oh wait I can do that that's hyper-threading one processor and intelligent scheduling to make sure that it's always working pretty awesome right well usually hyper-threading can't do much for single threaded workloads where you can only work on one thing at a time for example if you wanted to eat a two scoop ice cream cone you can't work on the bottom scoop until the top scoop has already been consumed and heaven help you if you try to eat the cone first in this example there is no benefit to adding more mouths or more hands the opposite of this would be eating from a bowl of candies grabbing and eating a red candy does not in any way depend on finishing the blue candy that's already in my mouth in fact if I had some friends to help me eat it we could consume the candy very quickly by adding more hands and more mouths this is an example of a multi-threaded workload and hyper-threading can definitely help with this all right so let's bring it away from the eating analogy for a minute and bring it back to the real-world computing tasks that benefit from hyper threading and multiple processing cores are video editing 3d rendering and heavy multitasking on your PC video editing is a great example because one frame of a video can be well the next one is queued up because the video is already shot the PC doesn't have to guess what's going to be in the next frame it already knows here's another multitasking example one processor can be handling your light tasks like Skype and music playback antivirus and whatever else you have running in the background while another one can focus all its attention on running a power-hungry video game in the foreground so with that out of the way how do you actually choose a processor for your PC the first thing I hope you got out of this is that whatever task manager might say hyper threading is not the same as doubling your processing course it's basically a clever trick for more efficient scheduling of the work that is done by the processing course that you have it also increases power consumption and heat output a little bit but the benefits usually outweigh this drawback in the real world you can get huge double-digit performance improvements all the way to no performance improvement at all and in very rare cases even very slightly decreased performance depending on how the software is optimized so it's important to do your research about the software you'll be running if the work you do isn't heavily multi-threaded then you might do just as well to save your money and buy a processor that doesn't have hyper threading most games right now for example can take advantage of more than a couple of threads however if the work you do is heavily multi-threaded them remember this general rule hyper threading is better than no hyper threading but is not nearly as good as adding more physical processors in an ideal world lots of physical processors each with hyper threading is where it's at speaking of where it's at audible.com gives you a free audiobook just for setting up a new account and if you use the audible.com slash Linus link below me then it makes me look pretty good they've got over 150,000 books with everything from fiction to self-help to business I checked out the 4-hour workweek by Timothy Ferriss which is why I am in Hawaii right now that's right suckers I recorded this before I left and now I'm on vacation actually I'm not on vacation I'm in Hawaii working but you know I'm taking a few days to not work on there so you know yeah YouTube's a tough gig but you can help by heading over to audible.com - and getting your free audiobook today this has been another episode of fast as possible here on tech quickie don't forget to subscribe for more videos like this and if you check out the other link in the video description you can suggest future topics for fast as possible and that is exactly why we're doing this one about hyper-threading so many people requested it so we do read them and we do listen