by Anton Shilov
06/22/2003 | 04:23 PM
AMDMB.com hosts a document that is presumably AMD’s official position concerning Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology. Advanced Micro Devices claims that Intel’s HT technology is hardly an advantage of the Pentium 4 processors and in same cases even influences performance negatively.
<%BANNER[article]%>AMD says industry standard benchmark tests show that the Hyper-Threading does not provide consistent performance benefits on real-world desktop applications. Enabling
Hyper-Threading can even worsen a Pentium 4 processor’s performance by as much as 10% on some applications. In fact, the statement seems to be correct, since the Hyper-Threading does not provide benefits all the time and sometimes even reduces speed. We need to note that there are a lot of cases when the Hyper-Threading does provide benefits.
Additionally, AMD states that the Hyper-Threading is not necessarily needed for multitasking and AMD Athlon XP processors are still faster than the Pentium 4 processors in a lot of cases.
This is the second time this year AMD is seen discussing disadvantages of Intel’s products in its documents (see this news-story to find out what AMD thinks about i845G), in case, the document titled as “PC Performance & Hyper-Threading: What you should know” really comes from the Sunnyvale, California-based CPU maker.
PS. Some analysts and observers believe AMD plans to implement technologies similar to Intel’s Hyper-Threading in its future microprocessors. I wonder if this document means we will not see any kind of Hyper-Threading in AMD’s CPUs anytime soon? Well, Intel, IBM, Sun have a lot of plans of boosting performance of their chips using similar techniques. Looks like AMD chooses another way...