What's the improvement with hyperthreading?

[robertsig]

After all the posts I found about i7 hyperthreading being better than i5's, I couldn't find a single one with a comparison.

Has there been any tests published here about the speed improvement of using hyperthreading? I assume a simple BIOS change to disable and testing it would be able to show the difference in CPU usage. Unfortunately all my PC's at home are i5's but I would be willing to seek out an i7 if it was that much better.

 

[nejakejnick]

It lowers CPU usage in half, so people are happy, but that does not mean that it handles twice as much. It is really hard to say how much better it is because there is no way to benchmark it. Generally, it is highly dependant on the task, it might be 20% for video decoding but if you start doing something else on the PC, that specific task might get a significant boost (10x or 100x... depends).

I would say it is worth the money.