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There is a lot of buzz about the latest hyper-threading technology. All of us know that enterprises, gaming software applications, and online businesses place a high demand on processors. To improve performance in the past, threading was enabled in software by splitting instructions into multiple streams. However, the hyper-threading technology enables you to get thread-level parallelism on each processor resulting in more efficient use of processor resources and improved performance.

Hyper-threading technology based on the idea of simultaneous multi-threading technology (SMT) where multiple physical CPUs are used to process multiple threads at once. Created by Intel, the hyper-threading technology aims to build multiple logical processors inside a single physical CPU. Hyper-Threading technology, as the name implies, allows the CPU to work on two threads at one time.

This technology is transparent to operating systems and programs. All that is required to take advantage of hyper-threading is symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) support in the operating system, as the logical processors appear as standard separate processors. It is possible to optimize operating system behavior on multi-processor hyper-threading capable systems, such as the Linux techniques discussed in Kernel Traffic.

Hyper-Threading offers two logical processors in one physical package. Each logical processor must share external resources like memory, hard disk, etc. and also must use the same physical processor for computations. This technology is independent upon platform. Some applications are already multi-threaded and will automatically benefit from this technology. Multi-threaded applications take full benefits of the increased performance that Hyper-Threading Technology has to offer, permitting users will see immediate performance gains when multitasking.

Hyper-threading technology has a great future in the coming years. Intel had released the Nehalem (Core i7) in November 2008 in which hyper-threading makes a return. Nehalem contains 4 cores and effectively scales 8 threads.