My laptop has an i3 processor and I knew that i3 processors have 2 physical cores. But when I open Task Manager, I can see 4 CPUs. Even opening "device manager" shows 4 CPUs. So I was a bit confused on this.
A bit of research on the internet showed that the i3 processors have Hyper-Threading (HT) enabled by default. What that means is that the OS sees each 'physical' core as two 'logical cores'. This enables the operating system to schedule tasks to both the logical CPUs simultaneously.
The performance increases because whenever there is a cache miss or the CPU enters wait state due to a dependency, the other waiting thread can be put on the CPU core immendiately. This ensures optimal utilization of our CPU core resources.
So how is this different from traditional multithreading? In multi-threading the OS does the time-division multiplexing between multiple threads, whereas in HT the OS sees the core as two logical CPUs. Also in HT, when we talk about threads, it is hardware level threads. Each OS maps its OS level threads to the hardware threads.
A bit of research on the internet showed that the i3 processors have Hyper-Threading (HT) enabled by default. What that means is that the OS sees each 'physical' core as two 'logical cores'. This enables the operating system to schedule tasks to both the logical CPUs simultaneously.
The performance increases because whenever there is a cache miss or the CPU enters wait state due to a dependency, the other waiting thread can be put on the CPU core immendiately. This ensures optimal utilization of our CPU core resources.
So how is this different from traditional multithreading? In multi-threading the OS does the time-division multiplexing between multiple threads, whereas in HT the OS sees the core as two logical CPUs. Also in HT, when we talk about threads, it is hardware level threads. Each OS maps its OS level threads to the hardware threads.
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