From www.techspot.com

Serving the tech enthusiast community for over 25 years.
TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. Read our ethics statement.

What just happened? Hyper-Threading has been a longstanding feature in Intel CPUs, but that might change in the near future. According to a recent report, Intel’s upcoming 15th-gen Core “Arrow Lake” desktop processors may do away with HT technology. While earlier rumors hinted at such a development, this would represent a significant decision for Intel, one that might leave many prospective customers disappointed.

The information is sourced from confidential Intel documentation recently leaked by tipster @yuuki_ans (since deleted) and highlighted by the German site 3DCenter. Although the initial focus was on the specifications of the Arrow Lake-S chips, a closer inspection revealed that the processors will likely feature eight performance cores and as many threads, lacking support for simultaneous multi-threading (SMT).

The exclusion of Hyper-Threading could have a potentially adverse impact on the performance of Arrow Lake chips in some situations. While single-threaded performance may remain unaffected due to the removal of HT, certain multi-threaded applications might experience a slight decline when compared to hyper-threaded processors, such as the Raptor Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh chips.

Intel’s Arrow Lake-S desktop CPUs could ditch Hyper-Threading after more than two decades

Fortunately for gamers, the removal of Hyper-Threading is not expected to impact gaming performance in AAA titles. In fact, Intel is reportedly targeting a 30 percent improvement in gaming performance with its Arrow Lake lineup. There’s a high probability that the company can achieve this through architectural improvements and higher clock speeds, regardless of the absence of extra threads.

Hyper-Threading was initially introduced by Intel in the early 2000s to enhance the performance of its single-core Xeon and Pentium 4 processors in multi-threaded workloads. However, the x86 landscape has undergone significant changes since then, and the availability of processors with numerous cores means that Hyper-Threading is not as crucial today as it was a couple of decades ago. Nevertheless, it still provides assistance in some heavily-threaded applications and can offer a notable performance boost in certain scenarios.

For those wondering, the original leaked document revealed quite a few details about the upcoming Arrow Lake-S chips. First off, they could feature up to an 8+16+1 core configuration and support DDR5-6400 memory, which would be a nice improvement over the DDR5-5600 RAM supported by the 14th-gen lineup. The document also revealed that Arrow Lake-S will support 24 PCIe lanes, including 16 PCIe 5.0 lanes for the GPU and eight for NVMe SSDs.

[ For more curated Computing news, check out the main news page here]

The post Intel’s Arrow Lake-S desktop CPUs could ditch Hyper-Threading after more than two decades first appeared on www.techspot.com

New reasons to get excited everyday.



Get the latest tech news delivered right in your mailbox

You may also like

Subscribe
Notify of
0 Comments
Newest
Oldest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

More in computing