DMala |
Sleep is overrated
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Reged: 05/09/05
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Posts: 3989
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Loc: Waltham, MA
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Re: AMD Zacate is faster than Intel Atom for MAME
03/05/11 08:25 AM
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> I'm also surprised that hyperthreading has such a tangible benefit in multithreaded > applications; the Zacate is consistently 60% - 80% faster than the Atom in MAME > single threaded games, but in multithreaded games that drops to 25% or so. Since both > processors have two real cores and the Atom has two additional 'fake' cores, the > difference can I think be mostly attributed to the benefit of hyperthreading. I > always thought of hyperthreading as kind of a gimmick; but I guess there really is > something to it after all.
The way I heard an Intel engineer explain it, unless the code is highly optimized, a single thread running on a processor can leave it idle for a significant number of clock cycles. Hyperthreading allows you to reclaim those cycles and utilize the processor more efficiently. So it depends somewhat on what you are doing, but there is definitely more to hyperthreading than just marketing BS.
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