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Hyper-Threading is an Intel-developed technology that makes one physical CPU core appear as two "logical" cores to the operating system, allowing a single core to process two threads of instructions simultaneously. This boosts performance, especially for multitasking and multi-threaded applications, by improving the efficiency of the CPU and reducing the time it spends idle.

How it works

Simultaneous multi-threading: Hyper-Threading is Intel's version of a technology called simultaneous multithreading (SMT).

Duplicating resources: It works by duplicating certain parts of a physical core, such as registers and instruction queues, so it can handle two separate streams of instructions at once.

Operating system view: The operating system sees two logical cores and shares the workload between them, which can lead to better multitasking and overall performance improvements.

Handling idle time: When one thread is stalled or waiting, the core can immediately work on the second thread instead of remaining idle, making better use of the processor's resources.