Hyper-Threading Speeds Linux
By Duc Vianney

The Intel Xeon processor introduces a new technology called Hyper-Threading (HT) that, to the operating system, makes a single processor behave like two logical processors. When enabled, the technology allows the processor to execute multiple threads simultaneously, in parallel within each processor, which can yield significant performance improvement. We set out to quantify just how much improvement you can expect to see.

The current Linux symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) kernel at both the 2.4 and 2.5 versions was made aware of Hyper-Threading, and performance speed-up had been observed in multithreaded benchmarks.