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.