Hyperthreading!!

[Prof Bill]

Excellent link but the story is a little more complicated for the end-user than what Phil Taylor explicitly states.

We all have to ask ourselves if we have a "Hyperthreaded Enabled Processor" and a motherboard with a "HT Technology enabled Chipset" installed to take advantage of the performance improvements and throughput gains that Phil Taylor describes!!
By examining the BIOS this can quickly be determined as Hyperthreading is enabled in the BIOS. If the line does not appear you do have not a Hyperthreaded Processor!

I discovered last year that I had to wait for a suitable cost effective processor to become available.

I would draw your attention to the following link to Intels site that might well be most helpful to those who want to take advantage of all the hyperthreading facilities in SP1.

http://www.intel.com/products/ht/hyperthreading_more.htm?iid=technology_ht+rhc_requirements

Hope this helps!

Bill.

I decided to start a new thread as I recently did a survey of twenty three system users who believed they had HYPERTHREADING enabled and the results were most surprising.
Fourteen who thought they had it enabled on checking had not.
Three had no idea whatsoever on how to enable it and believed it happened automatically when the software that used it was invoked.
The remaining six had concluded that they did not have processors that supported HYPERTHREADING even though they assumed that when they purchased their CPUs it had HT support because of all the hype, blogs and announcements. They now carefully check all newly announced CPU Specifications.

If you endeavour to locate an INTEL HT Enabled CPU on the site below you will discover that INTEL has not yet appointed dealers for their HT Quad CoreTechnology at least here in the UK.

http://www.intel.com/cd/corporate/buy/emea/eng/desktop/boxed-processor/index.htm

It would be most interesting to discover and hear about the experiences of how many Flight Simulation Systems are out there enjoying the benefits of
HYPERTHREADING supported by SP1 as described by Phil Taylor!

Bill.

[Prof Bill]

I have concluded an indepth investigation of the current value of Hyperthreading in FSX and the conclusion several of us have come to is that there is nothing there at the moment that would warrant an investment in a Hyperthreading enabled CPU.

I guess we are a year to two years away from reaping the benefits of this piece of technology in terms of cost effectiveness!

Bill.

[NicD]

Isn't HT a redundant (single-core) technology now? I was hoping that FSX would take advantage of multi-core processors under Vista.

[Prof Bill]

The answer is "yes" and "no" depending on your application environment.
Hyperthreading is essential here for us as we need everything hardwired especially our Inferencing Language Engines (particularly specific language instruction sets) that have up to Eight fast single processors on each motherboard.
The fun part for me is to use one of these adapted motherboards with a slightly modified OS that can support FSX.
I use a couple of ASUS Maximus Extremes in my non experimental Flight simulator system.
FSX does indeed very much take advantage of Multicore delivering good performance results. VISTA is in my experience an excellent OS that supports applications that have multicore support very efficiently.
Nevertheless there are faster hardware architectures in the pipeline that will utilise Hyperthtreading.
Our own small linked mainframes here use Hyperthreading very effectively.

Bill.