question about Intel P4 versus Alpha's

[Mikhail Kuzminsky]

According to Dominic Wu
> Is HT anything more than a thinly-veiled attempt at luring more software
> developers to develop multi-threaded applications so as to help Intel sell
> more CPU in the future?  (I.E. the new fangled software that is optimized
> for HT can really benefit from additional REAL processors instead of using
> just HT?)
  No. It looks that the "reasons" were other. 1) It is known that
a lot of "execution resources" (in particular, execution units) of
superscalar microprocessors are not used (simultaneously) by
many applications -  especially which don't give heavy load for
CPUs. 2) The possibility to organize multitherading execution
by modern superscalar chips "costs" (in the sense of additional
hardware ) very low, and was practically realized by Intel a lot of time ago.
But they opened this possibility for users only early.
3) One of the powerful "reasons" to propose HT was the war w/AMD;
HT is excellent marketing step.

BTW, IMHO, we must say "thanks" to Intel for introducing HT:
now paralelization will come to desktop computer, and the corresponding
parallelization technologies will be necessary for new areas of applications.

Mikhail Kuzminksy
Zelinsky Institute of Organic Chemistry
Moscow