Intel’s most recent financial update revealed a revenue drop in Q2 and conservative forecasts for the near term. In a memo from CEO Lip Bu Tan addressed to employees and later released externally, the company laid out a series of strategic moves: investing in AI projects, bolstering its foundry business, and undertaking a workforce adjustment that includes a 15% reduction in staff and streamlining management by half. Nestled among these operational changes was a key technical announcement—Intel will bring back simultaneous multithreading (SMT), often referred to as Hyper?Threading, in its next-gen wave of processors.

Historically, Intel started dialing back Hyper?Threading with its 12th?generation chips. Initially, only the high?performance cores supported SMT; by the time the 14th?generation chips rolled out, Hyper?Threading had been fully removed. The upcoming Nova Lake architecture and its immediate successor will not feature SMT. Still, Intel’s roadmap indicates a return of this technology further down the line. Performance testing in recent reviews showed that SMT isn’t strictly necessary for achieving top?tier gaming speeds or single?thread benchmarks. However, the ability to toggle multithreading is something many PC builders and system administrators appreciate, especially when optimizing for parallel workloads or specific application profiles.

Technically, SMT allows each physical CPU core to handle two threads simultaneously, improving utilization of on?chip resources when running multithreaded tasks. Its absence in recent Intel CPUs was part of a broader shift toward asymmetric core layouts, where efficiency and performance cores have different feature sets. Bringing SMT back will unify threading capabilities across all core types in future designs. For data centers, this can translate to higher throughput on server workloads such as virtualization, database operations, and large?scale data processing. On desktops, end users will regain the ability to balance multi?application multitasking with single?thread performance, tweaking BIOS settings to enable or disable Hyper?Threading based on their specific needs.

From an architectural standpoint, reintroducing SMT suggests Intel has refined its core designs to better handle simultaneous threads without compromising power efficiency or thermal characteristics. This could involve microarchitectural tweaks—such as improved branch prediction and dynamic resource allocation—that mitigate the performance overhead and power draw often associated with multithreaded execution. When SMT returns, developers and system integrators will likely have new firmware controls and monitoring tools to manage thread scheduling granularly, ensuring optimal performance across diverse workloads.

For enthusiasts and enterprise users alike, the return of Hyper?Threading marks a shift back toward offering maximal configurability. While AMD’s multithreading implementations have long been a standard in consumer and server markets, Intel’s reinstatement of SMT will close the feature gap and provide parity in threading capabilities. Those who disabled Hyper?Threading in recent BIOS revisions—either to reduce power consumption or tighten security—will regain the flexibility to re?enable it for tasks that benefit from increased thread counts.

In data center, we are focused on regaining share as we ramp Granite Rapids while also improving our capabilities for hyperscale workloads. To support this, we are reintroducing simultaneous multi-threading (SMT). Moving away from SMT put us at a competitive disadvantage. Bringing it back will help us close performance gaps. We are also making good progress in our search for a permanent leader of our data center business, and I plan to share more on that this quarter. Across client and data center, I've directed our teams to define next-generation product families with clean and simple architectures, better cost structures and simplified SKU stacks. In addition, I have instituted a policy where every major chip design is reviewed and approved by me before tape-out. This discipline will improve our execution and reduce development costs.

Source:?Intel?via tpu

The above is the detailed content of Future Intel CPUs to Feature SMT Again: Hyper?Threading Returns. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!