Intel 15th Gen CPUs to Get Rentable Units: Why Hyper-Threading is Going Away

Harware Times ^ | 14 August 2023 | Areej

[ShadowAce]

[SaveFerris]

Excellent.

I need to install some of these in a hyper-alloy combat chassis; fully-armored; very tough.

[dfwgator]

Translation: You’ll be able to download your porn faster.

[sauropod]

Bkmk

[Tell It Right]

Maybe I'm not seeing the advantage. I thought we've already had something like this for years, including in Intel processors for desktops/laptops. Hasn't this been accessible in multi-threading apps already with things like what C# .Net provides in the example:

use System.Threading;

Thread T1 = new Thread(work);
Thread T2 = new Thread(work);

T1.Priority = ThreadPriority.Highest;
T2.Priority = ThreadPriority.BelowNormal;

I use something like that in my homemade app for downloading market data I use for a little swing trading (very little, more like a hobby) from 3 free sources and writing it to a database, all in the background so it doesn't hog up my system. And with a sister app I have it generate reports and graphs for me at high priority so that it gives me the reports quickly since I'm manually calling for them.

[Larry Lucido]

[ClearCase_guy]

My wife summarized this article for me and explained that the thingies don’t need to do the you-know-whats. So that now they have a different whatchamacallit. And it’s good.

[SaveFerris]

Justine Miceli

I thought I saw her in a shampoo commercial

Pantene?

Cue more Seinfeld

[Skywise]

Bleh - for a second I thought Intel was trying to go to a subscription model on their processors with “rentable units” - the first core comes included with the CPU - rent the additional cores on your cpu with a modest monthly subscription fee!

[Angelino97]

I heard that Intel CPUs have backdoors that allow intel agencies to spy on you, regardless of what software you use. And that AMD CPUs might be more secure.

Does anyone know if any of this is true?

[Skywise]

“Hyper threads” aren’t the same as system threads. System threads are OS based and run simultaneously in the background like apps. The OS sends all these to the CPU which then executes all the different instruction lines. During execution it can “interweave” the various threads and apps into the same core for processing (hyper threading) to speed things up.

If I’m reading this right - Their new system is going to do the same thing but at the core level now. So execution blocks are going to get chunked off and sent to various cores rather than try to interweave the executions. Basically it’s a different load balancing/multitasking strategy.

I suspect it’s also more secure to go this route as it will help prevent microcode data hacking by keeping the code lines on separate cores.

[Skywise]

If the CIA got back doors onto the Intel chips then it got them on the AMD ones too.

I don’t think there’s intentional back doors on either though - just known exploits that the CIA can use.

Windows OTOH…

[Myrddin]

Many languages support threading that can be leveraged by hyper-threaded processors. Most developers ignore the capability unless there is real value to splitting off threads. The downside of multiple threads is controlling concurrent access to data. The code gets a lot more complex. There must be a tangible payback for the effort required to build a multi-threaded app.

[xp38]

So is this FR thread hyper or not?

[bak3r]

I have heard this over the years. It seems highly unlikely that this is the case. It is more likely that there have been exploits vs true back doors. We have seen this quite a bit over the last few years with possible vulnerabilities in intel’s microcode. I doubt it because it would be a hack worth trillions of dollars, keeping that secret would be nearly impossible. Secondly traffic should still be detectable with a decent firewall or pcap on network cards. To be undetectable to 3rd party hardware, it would require a cellular modem integrated into the cpu itself, which could then be easily disabled with shielding. At the end of the day getting a BS FISA warrant and planting something illegal is just easier.

[Zathras]

Defiantly NOT true.
This is rumor is probably related to Intel’s attempt to create a very secure system back in the 90’s based on the internal thermal sensor.
The NSA used its influence to fabricate a story so the project was abandoned and we ended up with AES which given enough time, the NSA can break.

I worked for the Intel processor design team for 20 years.

[Dr. Sivana]

I remember back when Intel wanted to put unique serial #s on each 80486 processor that could be identified outside the box, that privacy advocates cried foul.

Since then, that seems like nothing.

[ducttape45]

Thanks for the article, but, I’ll stick with my 5th generation Intel processor and 6th generation Intel board courtesy of Gigabyte. It works just fine, and I can still run Windows 7 (as well as W10 and Linux of course)!

[zeugma]

I suspect that what this really means is that now the separate cores will be standing by more efficiently for all the single-threaded applications to finally get done with their work. I’m constantly disappointed in how few applications really make use of the multi-core abilities of modern procssors.

OTOH, I recently was ripping some DVDs recently, and for the first time in a long time, I saw my processor pretty much maxed out for a sustained time. I think I had a load average of 15 or so.