10 May
2010
10 May
'10
8:49 p.m.
Ah, another myth to bust. Intel did not come up with
hyperthreading. It was developed by researchers at the University of Washington in
collaboration with DEC, and would have shipped in the 21464. (I took Computer
Architecture from one of those researchers.) It attempts to take advantage of
thread-level parallelism, as instruction-level parallelism (leveraged by superscalar
architectures) still leaves a fair amount of 'dawdle time' for the chip's
functional units. Modern multilevel memory architectures are pretty good at keeping
processors fed -- Ian
There was also work done on hyperthreading at MIT. The first
time I heard the idea of hardware multi-threading was a conference
luncheon when I happened to sit at the same table as Jack Dennis.
This would have been around '92 or '93.
BLS