RASKA

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There was an anandtech article that said the Athlon64 are great at multitasking, and then there's all the P4 people who swear that HT is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
 

gothitbycar

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Multi-tasking with an athlon 64 is good, multi-tasking with a P4 w/ HT is better. The A64 can't really compete in multi-tasking compared to the two logical processors of the P4.

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oh, its a nice day. TO EAT CHILDREN!!!
 

Mephistopheles

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It's not the greatest thing since sliced bread, but it is more powerful than the press and the reviews would lead us to believe.

We ran some benchmarks once with HT enabled and disabled. A few of our critical benches ran for 34 minutes with it disabled and 23 minutes with it enabled. This is pretty damned impressive stuff.

Granted, you won't see lots of code with which you can get this kind of boost, but multithreaded code does run smoothly on P4.
 

miahallen

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Okay, I think the example above is a bit misleading, <b>most</b> apps (and only ones written for HT) see about a 10-20% improvement, which is still notable...however, with dual core tech just around the corner, one should plan system purchases accordingly. Unless you <b>need</b> the best <b>currently</b> available.

AMD is sure to have a good lead in this area (dual core), and will likely see much more significant performance improvements than Intel's HT with these same apps.
 

Mephistopheles

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Misleading, you're right, I agree... That's why I said that you won't be seeing these boosts very often, but HT does add value to P4.

Also...
however, with dual core tech just around the corner, one should plan system purchases accordingly.
What are you talking about? Dual core is at least another 9-12 months away! That's not "around the corner", that's still a year away...