A recent blurb about the triple core PowerPC chip that will be used in the Xbox 2 claims that each of these cores will have a technology similar to intel's hyperthreading.
This means that there would effectively be 6 logical cores to do the processing!
Could this be a sign for what is to come on the mac in a next gen powerpc?
For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, hyperthreading is a technology intel introduced that allows a chip to use more of its processing units at once. Previously, a program thread that calls on the integer units on a chip to work will only use those units, while the floating point units sit idle.
With hyperthreading, the threads are organized in such a way that while the integer units are chomping away, floating point threads are also being used to keep the floating point units on the chip busy. This means that more of the chip is used at once and intel claims that performance gains of up to 30% can be seen with this technology.
This means that there would effectively be 6 logical cores to do the processing!
Could this be a sign for what is to come on the mac in a next gen powerpc?
For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, hyperthreading is a technology intel introduced that allows a chip to use more of its processing units at once. Previously, a program thread that calls on the integer units on a chip to work will only use those units, while the floating point units sit idle.
With hyperthreading, the threads are organized in such a way that while the integer units are chomping away, floating point threads are also being used to keep the floating point units on the chip busy. This means that more of the chip is used at once and intel claims that performance gains of up to 30% can be seen with this technology.