hypersäikeistystä

Hypersäikeistys, also known as hyperthreading, is a proprietary multithreading technology developed by Intel. It allows a single physical CPU core to act like two logical cores, improving the performance of multi-threaded applications. This is achieved by enabling a single core to process multiple threads of instructions concurrently.

When a CPU core is executing a thread, it might encounter situations where it has to wait for data from memory or other system components. These waiting periods, known as stalls, would normally leave the core idle. Hyperthreading exploits these idle cycles by allowing the core to switch to another thread and execute its instructions. This way, the core can be kept busier, leading to a higher overall throughput of instructions.

The effectiveness of hypersäikeistys depends on the nature of the workload. Applications that are highly parallel and can effectively utilize the resources of two logical cores often see significant performance gains. However, for applications that are not designed for multithreading or are already heavily utilizing a single core's resources, the performance improvement may be minimal or even negligible. It is important to note that two logical cores provided by hypersäikeistys do not offer the same performance as two separate physical cores. Each logical core shares resources within the single physical core.