Compaq W8000 Hyper-Threading Technology, New Feature of Intel Xeon Processor - Page 12

Hyper-Threading Technology, New Feature of Intel Xeon Processor White Paper 12 • Microsoft Outlook 2000 • Microsoft PowerPoint 2000 • Microsoft Word 2000 • Netscape Communicator 6.0 • WinZip 8.0 Internet Content Creation: • Adobe Photoshop 6.0 • Adobe Premiere 6.0 • Macromedia Dreamweaver 4 • Macromedia Flash 5 • Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 7 Analysis SYSmark 2001 is a horizontal benchmark and runs only one application at a time. Therefore only the application thread is running for any given window time. To run the same benchmark on the true MP system does not yield any performance gain or degradation since most of the time the other processor is idle. In this case, when the Hyper-Threading technology is enabled to emulate multi-processing, performance is degraded about 5% since the application thread now is shared and competing with the OS threads for the same processor resources. That does not happen with a true multiprocessor system since each of the processors has its own resources. See Figure 10. SYSmark 2001 on Windows XP 250 200 200 188 222 212 180 167 150 Higher is better 100 50 0 Enable Disable Sysmark Rate 188 200 Internet Content Creation 212 222 Office Productivity 167 180 Figure 10 167T-0202A-WWEN