To hyperthread or to Dual Core?

SolarNexus

A dual core processor (say, an intel pentium 4 820) costs almost twice the price of a single core, but hyperthreaded processor (say, an intel pentium 4 630). so the question is, which is worth the euros? hyperthreaded or dual core?

my vote? I just bought an intel pentium 4 630 - infer from that what you will.

astrofool

i'd buy an athlon 64, or an x2

TomCo

As far as I know, with dual core both cores have hyperthreading.

SolarNexus

TomCo wrote:

As far as I know, with dual core both cores have hyperthreading.

to my knowlege thats not quite true, its something intel will tack onto the product line later on for more sales

Oh, and as for the AMD64 suggestion - considering most p4's come with 64bit now, theres really not much of an arguement there. And Xeons... insanely expensive.

Mutant_Fruit

For serious work, a dual core would be MUCH MUCH better than a fake "hyperthreaded" second core. If money wasn't too important, splash out on a dual core. Whilest a good few apps aren't multithreaded yet, they will be in the near future.

SolarNexus

Mutant_Fruit wrote:

For serious work, a dual core would be MUCH MUCH better than a fake "hyperthreaded" second core. If money wasn't too important, splash out on a dual core. Whilest a good few apps aren't multithreaded yet, they will be in the near future.

ahh, but by that time (which is a good hell of a long way off, considering how long its been for both 64bit and hyperthreading to take off) the prices will have lowered to roughly that of a hyperthreaded now. In all seriousness, we wont see any realistic advantage to dual core for another 2yrs minimum

BigEejit

What about licensing? dear god is anyone thinking about the licensing ... ahem ... dont Windaz 2k and XP only support 2 processors? (hyperthreading counts as one with Microsoft - just like a 2 year old kid counts as an adult with Ryanair)

ShiverinEskimo

I'd go with an Athlon 64 X2 - best dual core and resonably priced...oh wait - i did.

SolarNexus

ShiverinEskimo wrote:

I'd go with an Athlon 64 X2 - best dual core and resonably priced...oh wait - i did.

bah, that costs more than a p4 830

DemonOfTheFall

First of all, no intel dual-cores except for the Extreme Editions support hyperthreading. The 840 EE is the only one I know of and that is an absolute lemon of a processor, so not even worth considering really.

As far as licensing goes, Microsoft count by sockets/chips/whatever. That means that even if you have a 4 core, hyperthreaded processor (8 logical processors) it would still be good to go on Windows XP.

Recently Anandtech had 2 x Dual Core Xeons on review,
2 Processors x 2 Cores x Hyperthreading = 8 logical processors
Was working away just fine on Windows XP Pro. Although the two beasts were drawing over 300 watts between them

Back to the OP, it depends a lot on what you're doing. If you just want an extra bit of smoothness in using windows, hyperthreading will do. If you want to seriously use both cores fully, eg. video encoding, then it's gotta be dual core. If you're just playing games it's all pointless though, and a single core Athlon 64 is best.

BTW, SolarNexus, just because the latest Intel chips all have EMT64 doesnt mean that their 64-bit performance is anywhere near as good as the A64's. I don't really know anything about processor design but apparently intel's implementation is an ugly hack which isnt really 64-bit. It just means that they'll run in 64-bit mode, not that they'll gain any performance from it.

Also, as for it being 2 years before dual-core sees any benefits, we're already starting to see them now. nVidia's latest driver release sees a few percent performance boost on dual cores and numerous games in development are being coded to use more than one core. whew... long post

lan

SolarNexus wrote:

Oh, and as for the AMD64 suggestion - considering most p4's come with 64bit now, theres really not much of an arguement there. And Xeons... insanely expensive.

Why wouldn't you go with an Athlon, forgetting about 64bit for a moment, they are faster then Pentiums in nearly everything anyway. A single core Athlon will be faster then a similiarly priced Pentium with hyperthreading even in most multithreaded applications. The only applications the Pentium can compete in is encoding and if your doing a lot of that you definitly want duel core anyway. If you have the money, you should get a duel core Athlon, it's about €350 for the X2 3800+, best of both worlds.

You'll definitly notice a difference with duel core over hyperthreading, hyperthreading adds about 5% - 15% performance and a second core adds anywhere from 30% to 90% on multithreaded applications. Even if you don't run any, your OS is multithreaded and running more then one program at once will be much smoother

ShiverinEskimo

SolarNexus wrote:

bah, that costs more than a p4 830

Yea but P4 dual cores run very hot and just dont cut it against the X2s.

The Athlons are slighty more expensive (25 quid) but a whole lot better and overclock a good bit..

Going back the OP's original question - it all boils down to what you spend your time doing. I copy DVDs and do a lot of ripping and like to be surfing the net and using MSN at the same time but also play a lot of games so the dual core rocks my world - just the other day i was watching Ronin on DVD and converting avi's to mpeg 4 with no slow down on either.

If you multitask - yes, dual core is worth the extra green. But for your extra green you're also future proofing a little. If you don't do multitasking, if your broke or if you plan on upgrading in the not too distant future maybe you should think about a high end single core..

MrPinK

SolarNexus wrote:

ahh, but by that time (which is a good hell of a long way off, considering how long its been for both 64bit and hyperthreading to take off) the prices will have lowered to roughly that of a hyperthreaded now. In all seriousness, we wont see any realistic advantage to dual core for another 2yrs minimum

With the except of the gaming industry, multithreading is fairly common these days. Most decent processor intesive applications (for stuff like encoding, rendering, etc.) should be able to take advantage of a second CPU. And if it can't, then Hyperthreading only slows it down. It would run faster with HT disabled.

EDIT:

BigEejit wrote:

What about licensing? dear god is anyone thinking about the licensing ... ahem ... dont Windaz 2k and XP only support 2 processors? (hyperthreading counts as one with Microsoft - just like a 2 year old kid counts as an adult with Ryanair)

It's not a problem. http://www.gamepc.com/labs/print_content.asp?id=paxville. They have 2 dual core xeons with HT (8 virtual CPU's) running under XP Pro with no complaints

Capt'n Midnight

BigEejit wrote:

What about licensing? dear god is anyone thinking about the licensing ... ahem ... dont Windaz 2k and XP only support 2 processors? (hyperthreading counts as one with Microsoft - just like a 2 year old kid counts as an adult with Ryanair)

Microsoft count CPU's not cores - very important with things like SQL server that can be licensed per processor.


Anyway - with all the money Intel has spent on hyperthreading is there a real list of Windows apps that benefit from it anywhere ?
Open source apps should benefit more since they can be recompiled easily .

So far the only end user app I've seen speed up is 7za.exe the command line version of 7zip !

Khannie

More apps are becoming threaded now because of dual core processors. There was a list posted before but I can't find it with the searching disabled.

I'm pretty sure the GUI version of 7zip is threaded now too, but it's the only app that I regularly use that is threaded.

Edit: It's not threaded on linux. Just checked.

MrPinK

I know a lot of the standard benchmarking apps are now SMP optimized. 3D Studio Max, Maya, Windows Media Encoder, LAME, Sciencemark, etc. There's also a beta SMP DivX codec that claims some pretty amazing speed-ups, even for HT. The numbers might want to be taken with a pinch of salt seeing as they're coming from the DivX Labs site, and you only get these increases this big on the highest quality settings.

http://labs.divx.com/archives/000055.html