The innovative Hyper-Threading (HT) technology made its debut in Intel’s Pentium 4 processors in 2002, giving the company a competitive advantage in parallel computing. HT allows for the handling of two threads by a single processor core, increasing the performance of simultaneous computations. However, it seems that Intel is planning to abandon this feature in favor of more cores, which may bring benefits in terms of single-core performance.
The increased number of cores in Intel processors is somewhat paradoxical, as the company was resistant to increasing their number until recently. However, the success of competitors, primarily AMD, has prompted Intel to change its approach and focus on developing this aspect. This likely means the abandonment of Hyper-Threading.
New information about the potential abandonment of HT surfaced after the release of schematics for the upcoming Arrow Lake-S platform. It is worth noting that the flagship chip is expected to have up to 24 cores, but none of them will support multi-threading. This is significant from an architectural standpoint, especially for the P cores.
The Arrow Lake-S platform will be the first to be produced using Intel’s 20A process, aimed at making the company more competitive against TSMC. Additionally, it will introduce new technologies related to transistor production and power management, which should contribute to higher performance and clock speeds.
Will the abandonment of HT be beneficial for Intel? That will depend on the performance growth of the new P cores. If they can achieve a 20-30% increase compared to current processors, there will likely be no longing for HT. However, if the new cores are not as efficient, AMD could regain an advantage in multi-threaded computations.
It is also worth noting that the Arrow Lake-S platform will support PCIe 5.0 interfaces, as well as introduce support for DisplayPort 2.0 and HDMI 2.1. The new processors will also require DDR5 memory. However, we will have to wait until next year for their release.
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The source of the article is from the blog motopaddock.nl