Intel Core i7-980X Gulftown Six-Core 32nm Processor Review

Feature Test: Hyper-Threading (HT)

The Nehalem microarchitecture marks the return of Hyper-Threading (HT), which is a feature that was first implemented on the Pentium 4 "Northwood" but with little success. Thankfully, as we demonstrated in our original Core i7 review, with it's shorter, faster, more efficient pipeline (able to simultaneously process up to four instructions), Nehalem-based processors can truly make use of Hyper-Threading in certain workloads. To demonstrate this, we have benchmarked a small selection of multi-threaded applications with HT enabled and disabled.


The results speak for themselves. In highly multi-threaded applications, HT can make a significant difference, speeding up specific workloads by 8% to 35%. However, most contemporary games simply aren't designed to take advantage of more than four threads, much less twelve. This obviously negates any possible HT-related performance gains. However, Intel is obviously pushing software developers to ensure that more and more programs are designed to take advantage of all available threads, and we are aware of a handful of interesting titles that will be able to take full advantage of Gulftown's multi-threading prowess.