A CPU with two cores, for example, could run two different processes at the same time. A dual-core CPU has two central processing units, so it appears to the operating system as two CPUs. To increase performance, manufacturers add additional “cores,” or central processing units. That meant the physical CPU had a single central processing unit on it. Hyper-threading is no substitute for additional cores, but a dual-core CPU with hyper-threading should perform better than a dual-core CPU without hyper-threading. Your dual-core CPU with hyper-threading appears as four cores to your operating system, while your quad-core CPU with hyper-threading appears as eight cores. Thankfully, hyper-threading is now a “bonus.” While the original consumer processors with hyper-threading only had a single core that masqueraded as multiple cores, modern Intel CPUs now have both multiple cores and hyper-threading technology. Hyper-threading can help speed your system up, but it’s nowhere near as good as having actual additional cores. This can speed things up somewhat-if one virtual CPU is stalled and waiting, the other virtual CPU can borrow its execution resources. Hyper-threading allows the two logical CPU cores to share physical execution resources. In other words, the operating system is tricked into seeing two CPUs for each actual CPU core. The CPU pretends it has more cores than it does, and it uses its own logic to speed up program execution. While the operating system sees two CPUs for each core, the actual CPU hardware only has a single set of execution resources for each core. The CPU is still a single CPU, so it’s a little bit of a cheat. Hyper-threading attempted to make up for that.Ī single physical CPU core with hyper-threading appears as two logical CPUs to an operating system. The Pentium 4’s of the day featured just a single CPU core, so it could really only perform one task at a time-even if it was able to switch between tasks quickly enough that it seemed like multitasking. It debuted on desktop CPUs with the Pentium 4 HT back in 2002. Hyper-threading was Intel’s first attempt to bring parallel computation to consumer PCs.

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