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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD)
AMD 208.32+8.2%3:59 PM EST
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To: fyodor_ who wrote (53523)8/31/2001 9:51:05 PM
From: wanna_bmwRead Replies (1) of 275872
 
Fyo, Re: "Obviously the thruput will not be 2X of a single theaded system. But an improved thruput of 15%-40% sounds plausible.

If memory bandwidth is the bottleneck, adding multiple processors (or multiple virtual processors) won't do a bit of good."

It's not the resources, and it's not the memory. It's more like the management of both. The x86 instruction set does not favor Instruction Level Parallelism (ILP) nearly as much as many RISC architectures. Studies have found that optimized code rarely exceeds about 3 instructions per clock cycle. Optimized RISC instruction sets can't get much higher than 5. What multithreading does is increase the amount of Thread Level Parallelism (TLP), which helps the execution resources to be more fully used. The Alpha had the right idea building TLP into their EV8 core. Intel simply beat them to it. I don't know if Hyperthreading is as robust as the Alpha SMT, but the EV8 called for greater than 100% performance increase. It also had 4- or 8-way multithreading (can't remember which) compared the Hyperthreading, which is 2-way. I think the capability is there to do great things with it, but I also think it's a slow road towards really getting the best efficiency for the technology. But as you say, Fyo, it is very impressive that Intel was able to get 30% more floating point performance out of Hyperthreading, especially since the perception is that applications like Maya were already fairly efficient on working with processors. The applications for Hyperthreading in other apps seems astounding.

wanna_bmw
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