BlogSMT Benchmarking

Hyper-Threading Technology ( HT ), also known as Intel's Simultaneous Multithreading ( SMT ) is used for computing multiple tasks at the same time. And unless you are writing very low-level code, you don't need to worry about how HT works.

However, while Intel promises up to a 30% performance improvement, compared to identical non-SMT CPU, on practice it means that each thread can get only 60% of overall throughput.

Occasionally you might prefer to turn off SMT. For example if you have an important single-threaded application.In such case turning off SMT would allow your application to use 100% of original CPU performance.

But hardware and software are very complex now and it becomes more and more difficult to predict performance. With that regard it is better if you perform your own benchmarking to see exact results on your specific hardware.

Benchmarking on specific hardware
Benchmarking on specific hardware
3 February, 2015