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To: Road Walker who wrote (123349)	12/19/2000 5:54:41 PM
From: Elmer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

Re: "Can you explain to us tech challenged folks what "multi threading support" means, or better yet it's implications?" Ten would be better at this or maybe Scumbria if you could cut through the hostility and anti-Intel hatred but I'll give it a try. Multithreading would be the ability to execute independent instruction streams simultaneously. In some ways like a dual die. This is what AMD is hoping to do with their sludgepumper. Wouldn't it be a surprise if Intel beat them to it? It would also go a long way to explain the much larger die and transistor count which has so far seemed inexplainable. I have had no contact with the P4 project so I can't spill any secrets but this "Jackson Technology" term keeps turning up in leaks about Foster. Ten seems very excited about Foster's performance potential. Maybe this is why. He probably can't speak about this if it's true. My guess is that it is true but I don't know for certain. EP

To: Road Walker who wrote (123349)	12/19/2000 6:16:50 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Respond to of 186894

JF, <Can you explain to us tech challenged folks what "multi threading support" means, or better yet it's implications?> Multi-threading, or SMT (Simultaneous Multithreading), is a feature which allows a processor to run two or more separate and independent instructions streams, or threads, simultaneously. It's similar to having multiple processor cores on one die, except in this case, multiple threads are being run on one processor core. I can't say whether Foster will have SMT or not, but I do know that Compaq's EV8 Alpha will support 4-way SMT. They claim 4-way SMT will increase performance on SPECint by 100%, SPECfp by 50%, and transaction-processing server benchmarks by over 100%. The advantage of SMT over multiple cores is efficiency. Multiple cores cost more in terms of silicon. And you can even implement SMT along with multiple cores to really crank the performance on multithreaded applications. The disadvantage of SMT is its complexity, both in terms of hardware and software. (EDIT: Another disadvantage of SMT is the return-on-investment you get for the complexity. Like Scumbria said, it's easier to go with multiple cores, and you'll get better overall performance than with a single SMT core. But once again, there's nothing to prevent implementing both SMT and multiple cores all in one processor, so it's not necessarily a question of "either-or.") Tenchusatsu