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HyperThreading
From Odwiki
The Intel P4 chipset introduced a technology called hyper-threading. Though there is really only one CPU on the chip, by turning on hyper-threading, the operating system sees two CPU's on the chip. Hyper-threading allows MultiThreaded applications to use two virtual CPU's for every single CPU.
This is sometimes misleading to a user however, since there really only is a single CPU, so a hyper-threaded CPU, in worst case performance, gives only half it's processing power to each thread. In the best case however, the CPU itself can optimize the running of multiple threads, giving better performance than running two threads on a single, non-hyper-threaded CPU.
Experiments with Houdini show that hyperthreading yields about a 5% improvement in speed.
