HP warns hyperthreading might not work

MEGA PRINTER firm HP announced a sub-$1000 Media Center PC yesterday but has warned that Pentium 4 hyperthreading processors are not the legendary panacea that some might have thought they were.

While saying that it will allow its Media Center PC customers to personalise their machines from July 9th, HP also warned that the machines, which can use hyperthreading enabled Pentium 4 processors, might not yield the results expected.

In a statement announcing the Media Center initiative, HP also said:

"The Hyper-Threading feature is a new technology designed to improve performance of multi- threaded software products; please contact your software provider to determine software compatibility. Not all customers or software applications will benefit from the use of hyperthreading. Hyper-Threading Technology requires a computer system with an Intel Pentium 4 processor supporting HT Technology and a Hyper-Threading Technology enabled chipset, BIOS and operating system. Performance will vary depending on the specific hardware and software used."

Not quite what Intel says, in this page here.

"Hyper-Threading Technology is a groundbreaking innovation from Intel® Corporation that enables multi-threaded software applications to execute threads in parallel. This level of threading technology has never been seen before in a general-purpose microprocessor. Internet, e-Business, and enterprise software applications continue to put higher demands on processors. To improve performance in the past, threading was enabled in the software by splitting instructions into multiple streams so that multiple processors could act upon them. Today with Hyper-Threading Technology, processor-level threading can be utilized which offers more efficient use of processor resources for greater parallelism and improved performance on today's multi-threaded software."

The Media Center PCs come with a special version of Windows XP, so we suppose HP is just girding its loins against the possibility that a combination of the hyperthreaded Pentium 4 and Windows XP can slow down your PC. µ