Hyper Thread and heavy multitasking

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Samson90

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Feb 10, 2016
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Hello guys,

I'm still wondering if I will go with the i5-6600k or the i7-6700k (I have actualy a i7-860). I also hope to get a better general understanding of CPUs after this question.

I'm skeptic about how I would really benefit of HT and multitasking if I go toward the i7 (Or if I will actualy benefit of any of its advantages at all) if for example i :

Scenario 1
- Have 3-4 loaded web pages open.
- Have facebook open too.
- I start streaming Netflix at the same time too.
- Encoding videos into mp3 or whatever.

Or if:

Scenario 2
- Have a game, lets say WOW as an example, in the background (while waiting to join a raid.)
- Have Spotify running too.
- Browsing webpages at the same time (like Cnn) or watching youtube
- Downloading some stuff


Will HT helps in any of these scenarios?
It is what we call "heavy multitasking"?

Can a skylake i5 handle that kind of processing at the same time???

Thanks in advance!



 
Solution
basroil
That isn't heavy multi-tasking, even encoding audio is all lightly threaded. An i3 is more than enough in your case, i5 is overpowered, and i7 is way overkill.
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Thats what I thought, thank you basroil.
I will still go with the i5, and drop the i7, because i'm planning to play games like The Division, witcher 3 or Far cry 4 on high/ ultra settings.
 
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That's nonsense. HT works with ANY MULTITHREADED APPLICATION. For best results you should program light threads for HT "cores", but anything can and will work. For relatively well optimized, but not heavily optimized (critical server applications with RTOS), you will get 30~50% performance boost with HT.
 
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Ugh, Wrong.

Hyperthreading, AKA SMT, is a function of the microprocessor's architecture, not the OS. Failure by the application developer to properly account for the implications of SMT, or failure by the kernel developer to provide an adequate way to detect SMT and schedule threads appropriately can have adverse performance implications. This commonly occurs in video games that have multi-threaded physics.

@OP: Hyperthreading helps quite a bit with several common types of applications. Encoding/Decoding/Transcoding, Compressing/Decompressing, Compiling, parallel non-vector or small-vector numeric computation, highly loaded databases and web servers. HT provides either no or minimal benefit in gaming and web browsing.

In the scenarios that you describe, HT will be from no to marginal benefit. However, it will not hurt unless you're running a poorly designed application. On the other hand, the i7 series microprocessors have more cache than their i5 counterparts; this helps a lot too.
 
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You're a decade behind the times, and even then that article states that YOU CAN USE MULTITHREADED APPLICATION JUST FINE. The optimizations discussed are cache level when using core parking and light threads, but you don't NEED to use those optimizations, they just help. In fact, Windows 7 SP1 and up take care of thread scheduling for you to avoid penalties when possible, and ALL of those issues also pertain to multi-core chips (everything from Intel and AMD nowadays, even most ARM chips fit that now).

For OP's case though, an i5 will be more than enough, as none of his applications are actually optimized for multiple threads (certainly not web browsers and audio playback/recording, and video all goes through DXVA acceleration), though he won't actually be negatively affected if he goes for HT enabled chips like the i3 or i7
 
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