Is Intel’s Hyper-Threading Technology Worth the Extra Money to the Average User?

In the mid-1990’s, Intel Corporation decided to use symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) in order to increase the number of instructions that could execute simultaneously by putting more than one processor on a motherboard. This idea increased the overall performance of a system, but it was too expensive for the average user to afford. Intel then looked into the idea of simultaneous multithreading (SMT) for a single processor. The idea was to allow one processor to execute two threads simultaneously to increase the performance of the system. This technology was applied to Intel’s processors and is called hyper-threading technology. This paper compares SMP to SMT and shows how the two technologies as similar, but very different. It then goes on to describe the hyper-threading technology in a little more detail and shows how hyper-threading compared to non-hyper-threading processors against some benchmarks and tests.