The said:
A program that simulates hyper threading in software ??, i mean thats
what the Intell CPU does right, its just written on the chip or does
it use hardware as well to do this ?
No idea you tell me NOW.
HyperThreading is essentially provides two execution pipelines feeding into
the same processor core. It therefore fools the operating system into
thinking that there are in fact two processors (there is not)
It helps the performance of some of the more recent high clock P4's because
it mitigates some of the design failings of that chip. This is that the
Prescott has a very long instruction pipeline that costs more runtime if
the pipeline stalls. With HT if one pipeline stalls the thread being
executed by the other one can still be processed.
Yes it's a bodge !
More so it's a bodge that doesn't work very well as applications and
operating systems that do not multithread efficiently don't make full use
of it.
Anyway with the AMD design (that has a shorter pipeline) there is little
benefit that could be had from HT, given that HT is cheap to implement (in
terms of transistor count, power consumption and die size) If it did give a
reasonable performance advantage to the AMD design you can assume they
would have implemented it by now.
In answer to your question (sorry this is getting longwinded) Even if you
could emulate the two pipelines in software there would be no advantage in
doing so because you still only really have one, that plus the inherent
overhead such software emulation brings would result in a slower system not
a faster one.
