Articles Preface 2 Foreword 3 Hyper - Threading Technology Architecture and Microarchitecture 4 Pre - Silicon Validation of Hyper - Threading Technology 16 Speculative Precomputation : Exploring the Use of Multithreading for Latency

is full of new things. First, there is a new look and design. This is the first big redesign since the inception of the ITJ on the Web in 1997. The new design, together with inclusion of the ISSN (International Standard Serial Number), makes it easier to index articles into technical indexes and search engines. There are new " subscribe, " search ITJ, and " e-mail to a colleague " features in the left navigation tool bar. Readers are encouraged to subscribe to the ITJ. The benefit is subscribers are notified by e-mail when a new issue is published. The focus of this issue is Hyper-Threading Technology, a new microprocessor architecture technology. It makes a single processor look like two processors to the operating system. Intel's Hyper-Threading Technology delivers two logical processors that can execute different tasks simultaneously using shared hardware resources. Hyper-Threading Technology effectively looks like two processors on a chip. A chip with this technology will not equal the computing power of two processors; however, it will seem like two, as the performance boost is substantial. Chips enabled with Hyper-Threading Technology will also be cheaper than dual-processor computers: one heat sink, one fan, one cooling solution, and one chip are what are necessary. The six papers in this issue of the Intel Technology Journal discuss this new technology. The papers cover a broad view of Hyper-Threading Technology including the architecture, microarchitecture, pre-silicon validation and performance impact on media and compute-intensive applications. Also included is an intriguing paper on speculative precomputation, a technique that improves the latency of single-threaded applications by utilizing idle multithreading hardware resources to perform long-range data prefetches. Performance–affordable performance, relevant performance, and pervasively available performance– continues to be a key concern for end users. Enterprise and technical computing users have a never-ending need for increased performance and capacity. Moreover, industry analysts continue to observe that complex games and rich entertainment for consumers, plus a wide range of new business uses, software, and components, will necessitate growth in computing power. Processor resources, however, are often underutilized and the growing gap between core processor frequency and memory speed causes memory latency to become an increasing performance challenge. Intel's Hyper-Threading Technology brings Simultaneous Multi-Threading to the Intel Architecture and makes a single physical processor appear as two logical processors with duplicated architecture state, but with shared physical execution resources. This allows two tasks (two threads from a single …