Intel's Pentium 4 3.06GHz: Hyper-Threading on Desktops

Intel's Hyper-Threading technology has been officially around for just over a year now, but we've been hearing about the technology for even longer than that. Originally billed as a technology aimed solely at servers, there was no hiding the fact that Hyper-Threading was destined for the desktop, the only question was when.

We all thought that Hyper-Threading would make its desktop debut in 2003 with Prescott, which would give Intel time to work with software developers to begin to include initial forms of HT support in their products. Earlier this year it became clear that things at Intel were running ahead of schedule and Hyper-Threading would be making its desktop debut with the 3.06GHz Pentium 4.

An accelerated desktop release schedule meant that Intel was getting higher than expected yields on their 0.13-micron Pentium 4s but it also meant that Hyper-Threading was going to be arriving sooner than planned. We have been very skeptical about Intel's Hyper-Threading technology based on the poor desktop performance we saw back when we tried HT on the Xeon processors. As we reported during our coverage of the Fall 2002 Intel Developer Forum, apparently things have changed.

Over the past several weeks we've been running Intel's new Pentium 4 clocked at 3.06GHz through its paces and today we're finally able to bring you our experiences. Intel's got quite a bit coming over the next week and they're jump starting things by breaking the 3GHz barrier.