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Why just two hardware thread in core?

ALife
Beginner
2,077 Views

Hello,

Why just two hardware thread in core? why not four or eight thread?

Thanks

 

1 Solution
AP16
Valued Contributor III
818 Views

While number of execution units (ALUs, FPUs, VEs) in modern CPU cores is great, there are other resources still in limited amount, like decoder-translator, scheduler, registers, branch prediction unit, L1 caches. Logical CPU still needs some physical hardware, like own APIC and port on memory controller. Also, it is hard to get such sustained load of atomic instructions with no conflicts on EU type and shared data, especially on desktops. IBM Power architecture gets to SMT level of 8, but die size and TDP costs per core was (and still) tremendous.

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2 Replies
AP16
Valued Contributor III
819 Views

While number of execution units (ALUs, FPUs, VEs) in modern CPU cores is great, there are other resources still in limited amount, like decoder-translator, scheduler, registers, branch prediction unit, L1 caches. Logical CPU still needs some physical hardware, like own APIC and port on memory controller. Also, it is hard to get such sustained load of atomic instructions with no conflicts on EU type and shared data, especially on desktops. IBM Power architecture gets to SMT level of 8, but die size and TDP costs per core was (and still) tremendous.

Cesar_B_Intel
Employee
818 Views

Hello JFFulcrum

Thanks for your contribution this will help others.

Regards,

Caesar B.

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