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Table Of Contents
Hyperthreading
Hyperthreading technology allows a single physical processor core to behave like two logical processors.
The processor can run two independent applications at the same time. To avoid confusion between
logical and physical processors, Intel refers to a physical processor as a socket, and the discussion in this
chapter uses that terminology as well.
Intel Corporation developed hyperthreading technology to enhance the performance of its Pentium IV and
Xeon processor lines. Hyperthreading technology allows a single processor core to execute two
independent threads simultaneously.
While hyperthreading does not double the performance of a system, it can increase performance by
better utilizing idle resources leading to greater throughput for certain important workload types. An
application running on one logical processor of a busy core can expect slightly more than half of the
throughput that it obtains while running alone on a non-hyperthreaded processor. Hyperthreading
performance improvements are highly application-dependent, and some applications might see
performance degradation with hyperthreading because many processor resources (such as the cache)
are shared between logical processors.
Note On processors with Intel Hyper-Threading technology, each core can have two logical processors
which share most of the core's resources, such as memory caches and functional units. Such logical
processors are usually called threads.
Many processors do not support hyperthreading and as a result have only one thread per core. For such
processors, the number of cores also matches the number of logical processors. The following
processors support hyperthreading and have two threads per core.
n
Processors based on the Intel Xeon 5500 processor microarchitecture.
n
Intel Pentium 4 (HT-enabled)
n
Intel Pentium EE 840 (HT-enabled)
Hyperthreading and ESXi Hosts
A host that is enabled for hyperthreading should behave similarly to a host without hyperthreading. You
might need to consider certain factors if you enable hyperthreading, however.
ESXi hosts manage processor time intelligently to guarantee that load is spread smoothly across
processor cores in the system. Logical processors on the same core have consecutive CPU numbers, so
that CPUs 0 and 1 are on the first core together, CPUs 2 and 3 are on the second core, and so on. Virtual
machines are preferentially scheduled on two different cores rather than on two logical processors on the
same core.
vSphere Resource Management
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