Hyper Threading Technology in Hardware Architecture for Processor Efficiency Enhancement

Abstract

Intel’s Hyper-Threading Technology brings the concept of simultaneous multi-threading to the Intel architecture. Hyper-Threading Technology makes a single physical processor appear as two logical processors; the physical execution resources are shared and the architecture state is duplicated for the two logical processors. From a software or architecture perspective, this means operating systems and user programs can schedule processes or threads to logical processors as they would on multiple physical processors. From a micro architecture perspective, this means that instructions from both logical processors will persist and execute simultaneously on shared execution resources. This paper describes the Hyper-Threading Technology architecture of Intel’s first implementation on the Intel Xeon processor family. Hyper-Threading Technology is an important addition to Intel’s enterprise product line and will be integrated into a wide variety of products.