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Originally Posted by ernasty10050
wait so amd makes good processors
is that a good alternative to pentium 4 HT
or is it a piece of junk only useful for it's cost
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Basically a thread is an instruction sent to the CPU. A non HT CPU can only process a single thread at a time, so although it looks like all of your programs are using the CPU at once they are all actually taking turns to use CPU cycles.
Hyperthrading simply allows multi threaded programs to execute threads in paralell. A non HT CPU would have to execute the threads in series i.e. one at a time.
So this all means that programs such as Windows 2000 or Photoshop can treat the HT CPU as two seperate CPUs and execute multiple threads at once.
While this sounds good only a few programs actually take advantage of this capability.
The AMD equivilent, the Athlon64, is better for a number of reasons.
The main thing about 64bit computing is that it allows much larger number to be processed so you can get the processor to process a much larger chunk of code per cycle. Also they can access/use much more memory for example the maximum system memory of a 32bit processor is 4GB while a 64 bit processor can potentially use up to 18 billion gigabytes
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The main problem at the moment is that there are still few programs that take full advantage of the 64bit features but this will change in time. For instance windows XP 64bit edition should be with us soon.
soo if you cant be bothered to read all that...
Intel < AMD
woo.. longest post yet
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