After the long reign of the Pentium D and Core 2 processor series, Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology made a comeback late last year with the Core i7. Apparently, Microsoft felt inclined to tweak its next operating system to take better advantage of the technology. So points out InformationWeek, quoting a speech Microsoft Windows development chief Bill Veghte gave at the TechEd conference earlier this week:
The second thing that we’re excited to announce in terms of the cooperation and the work that’s been done is around hyper-threading. And obviously the work that Intel has done around hyper-threading across a multi-core system is absolutely critical for you. And so the work that we’ve done in Windows 7 in the scheduler and in the core of the system to take full advantage of those capabilities, ultimately we think together we can deliver a great and better experience for you. advantage
As you’ll know if you perused our Core i7 review (or our evaluation of the original 3.06GHz Pentium 4), Hyper-Threading is an implementation of simultaneous multithreading that allows processors to juggle two logical threads per physical core.
The Core i7 may be somewhat of a niche choice due to high platform costs right now, but Intel also plans to feature Hyper-Threading in 45nm Lynnfield quad-core derivatives later this year, not to mention 32nm Westmere dual-core offerings shortly after that. Both variants should find their way into notebooks, too.
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