What is Hyper-Threading?

In history, there was only a single CPU’s system. Later on, system improves and CPU contain the cores. Like dual core CPU, 4-Core CPU, 8-Core CPU and so on. Core means these are logical CPU’s. To again improve the system, Hyper-Threading technology is used. In Hyper-Threading one core contains 1 or more threads and that threads again behave like logical CPU’s. Because of it, several processes can run on different threads and improve the performance of the system.

Advantages

• Multitasking: If system supports Hyper-Threading then several processes can run simultaneously on the different threads of the CPU’s core.
• Resource Utilization: Using Hyper-Threading resources can’t be stay idle and utilized in great extent, because of several simultaneously running processes that can need resources. Because of this, the system’s overall efficiency and performance increases.
• Responsiveness: Concurrent execution helps to decrease the response time for user.

Disadvantages

• If many processes are running simultaneously because of Hyper-Threading, and these processes compete for limited resources, such as cache memory then resources may get blocked.
• Because of many running processes, resources are shared among them, which can lead to increase the contention and delays in input/output of resources.

How to check our system supports the Hyper-Threading or not?

If Thread(s) per Core is greater than 1 then we can say that this system support the Hyper-Threading.

Thread(s) per core > 1

Overall, Hyper-Threading improve the performance of multi-threaded applications on systems in modern computers via concurrent execution.