Apple Powermac Dual

What is multi-threading

When symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) for the first time cheap enough for the scope of users PC, many hardware enthusiasts anxious in the madness of the SMP were wondering what exactly (apart from winning their admiration and envy of their peers) platform dual treatment could do for them. It is in this context that the PC crowd began seriously talking about the benefits of multi-threading. Years later, when Apple has its range of dual-processor PowerMac, SMP was officially dominant, and with it, the multi-threading has become a concern for the user being as a result of benchmarks carried round by the fact that you really need multi-threaded applications to get all the benefits two processors.

Well as passionate about fashion PC SMP and long settled in a strange twist of fate, Mac users are now many times more likely to be a SMP platform sports a 86-with peers, multi-threading is once again ready to grow in importance for PC users. Next Intel IA-32 big version of the processor, code-named Prescott, will include a feature called simultaneous multithreading (SMT), also known as Hyper-Threading. To take full advantage of SMT, the applications must be multi-threaded, and as with SMP, the higher the degree of multi-threading application performance more material can be drawn from Prescott.

Intel is actually used in a shipment of SMT design: Pentium 4 Xeon. Towards the end of this article we take a look at how you Implement Xeon Hyper-Threading, this analysis should give us a pretty good idea of what is in store for Prescott. Moreover, it is rumored that the current generation Pentium 4 actually has the hardware built into the GTS, it's just disabled. (If you add this to the rumor on x86-64 is not present, but is turned off and then you can get an idea of how Intel is prudent when introducing new features. I would kill to get my hands on a P4 2.8 GHz with two SMT and support on x86-64).

SMT, in short, allows the processor to do what most people think they are anyway: run more than one program simultaneously. This may seem strange, therefore, to understand how this first article we will see how the current generation CPU handles multiple tasks. While talking about a technique called Super-threading before moving on to explain hyper-threading in the last section. So if you want to better understand the systems SMP multithreading and Hyper-Threading technology, then this article is for you.

As always, if you read some of my previous articles, you'll be well prepared to understand the technology the following discussion. So I will assume that you know the basics implementation of segmented and are familiar with the general division between front-end processor architecture and its execution core.

Apple Power Mac G5 Dual 1.8 1.5GB RAM LaCie D2 160GB HD