Originally Posted by Joseph Land
These will help explain. Remember that Intel and AMD do the same thing in their own way but use different terms due to copyright.

https://umatechnology.org/what-are-cpu-cores-vs-threads/

https://shardeum.org/blog/cpu-cores-and-threads/

https://computermesh.com/cpu-cores-vs-threads/
Unfortunately I think all of those articles are describing threads as I know them best, but in that context one can have many threads per core. All the processor specs I see list a fixed number of threads that is usually double or often a few fewer than double the number of cores.

I don't really know for sure what they're trying to tell us other than "mine's bigger than yours".

Some processors I've used in the past have multiple register sets that can be exchanged almost instantly, allowing a context switch in nearly zero time to a different set of data and probably code. I suspect what they're telling us is that some of the cores can do that because they have two sets of registers.

'Traditional' threads and/or processes would require most or all of the register content to be swapped in and out of those registers, costing time. Bu there's no inherent hardware constraint to that, so I think that's not what they mean.

I guess I could go and do some proper research on that, but I'm unlikely to much care now ... I no longer write operating systems.

Edit: if anyone cares, there's an explanation of Intel's 'hyper-threading' on Wikipedia, which says something akin to my "exchanged registers" above: Hyper-threading

Last edited by Gordon Scott; 05/14/25 09:51 AM.
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