AMD Developing Anti-Hyperthreading?
According to a guy who reported on some site in a different language that got transcribed and translated about three times before a very loose translation into English, AMD is looking to create a revoltuionary technology for their next generation of CPU’s. Instead of creating more cores on one processor running multiple threads, AMD is looking to create technology that makes the multi-core processors look and act like a single processor to the operating system.
Is this a good idea? I honestly don’t know. Due to my fairly extensive background in programming and a little bit in operating systems theory, I can say that it might be a good idea but at best it’s a stop-gap measure. See, most processors are built to run one thread at any given time, so up until a few years ago most programs were designed to run on a single thread.
That worked well until the 2-3ghz Pentium and Athlon machines became common and people weren’t making much use of the processor since only one thread was being run at any given time and frankly notepad, Internet Explorer, etc… didn’t exactly keep the processor busy. Intel’s clever solution was to create Hyperthreading, which allows a single processor to run multiple threads and, in general, act as two processors even though it was only one processor.
Hyperthreading was a pretty good idea, but it never really caught on like maybe it should. AMD had a different way of doing things. They created faster memory interfaces and more efficient processors to improve performance. That seemed to win out and now Intel is essentially one-upping AMD with super-efficient processors that are wicked fast.
The concept of anti-Hyperthreading seems like an almost Intel-esque response to the problem. Instead of beating Intel with processors that are actually faster, AMD would be creating processors that seem faster for the time being. What creating multiple cores to act as one core would do is create faster virtual processors than are able to be created as single processors. This would be a benefit to single-threaded software, but wouldn’t do much for multi-threaded software.
A multi-core solution is the best way to go for multi-threaded programs. As more programs become multi-threaded or even as Windows Vista runs more things in the background the solution to speed problems will be a balance between clock speed and the number of cores available.
Perhaps the biggest performance benefit of an anti-Hyperthreading technology would be to have 4 processors act as 2 or 8 processors act as 4. See, that way the machine would still retain the benefits of multiple processors, but would be able to run each thread faster. Even if AMD could achieve 80% of the combined speed, it might be a good way to go. Theoretically it could be possible to build a cheaper 8 core 2GHZ chip than a 4 core 3GHZ chip and if the 8 core 2GHZ chip used anti-hyperthreading each virtual core might be able to perform as well or better than the 3GHZ competitor. In a situation like that, this kind of anti-hyperthreading technology would make sense.
The problem with all of this speculation is that from an engineering standpoint, this isn’t an easy task. It would take some serious engineering to pull off such a processor design. In fact, I don’t even know if this kind of thing is even possible. It would take both brilliant hardware design along with some brilliant software drivers. If either AMD or Intel could create this technology, I would be seriously impressed.
