What is Hyper Threading?

Hyper-threading is a simultaneous multithreading (SMT) implementation used to improve parallelization of computations, doing multiple tasks at once on x86 microprocessors. It is a proprietary technology developed by global technology firm Intel.

For each processor core that is physically present, the operating system addresses two virtual or logical cores, and shares the workload between them when possible. The main function of hyper-threading is to increase the number of independent instructions in the pipeline; it takes advantage of superscalar architecture, in which multiple instructions operate on separate data in parallel. With HTT, one physical core appears as two processors to the operating system, which can use each core to schedule two processes at once. In addition, two or more processes can use the same resources: if resources for one process are not available, then another process can continue if its resources are available. Intel has included this technology in Itanium, Atom, and Core ‘i’ Series CPUs, amongst others.