Digital Home Thoughts: Toms Hardware Asks: Do You Want 6 Cores Or 12 Threads?

"Intel first used Hyper-Threading when it introduced the Pentium 4 "Northwood" processor at 3.06 GHz and the Xeon MP "Foster" series in 2002. The proprietary technology's main purpose is to improve processor utilization through increased parallelization. With the latest Core i7-980X and its six physical cores, Hyper-Threading yields 12 logical cores on desktop PCs. This raises the question: how much of the software that you run truly takes advantage of eight or more threads? Is Hyper-Threading good or bad for power efficiency? And wouldn't it make more sense to stay with six physical cores, rather than risking performance hits caused by less-heavily-threaded applications unnecessarily distributing workloads to logical units?"

I raised the question a few news posts back about how CPU's are progressing faster than current software's ability to use the power of all these extra cores. Toms Hardware have produced an article asking this exact question, especially as Intel are now releasing their high end chips with Hyper Threading enabled again, giving six core chips an extra six virtual cores. So can software take advantage of all these extra cores? Take a read and see what they conclude.