Can Athlon 64 multitask as well as P4 with HT?

[Ace No-Money]

I have been noticing my athlon XP clocked at 3200+ speeds has been slowing down when handling alot of programs at once.
I used to have a P4 2.8c with Hyperthreading and it never had troubles, even with 1/4 amount of DDR!
Does Hyperthreading really help THAT MUCH?!?!
I was planning on buying a 2600+ mobile and overclocking it faster than 2.4GHz, but if I can't multitask what is it worth?

I don't want to go back to a Pentium 4 so I wanted to know if the new AMD Winchester or Venice cores will offer me the freedom to run multiple programs just like P4's with HT. How do they compare in that way?

(Whew, I'm done typing!)

 

[m3trj]

Hyperthreading does make a significant difference with multitasking, as far as I can see. I went from a 2.6Ghz P4 to a 3Ghz with HT, and it does seem to handle multitasking quite a bit better. P4's also handle multitasking better than AMD processors, as you've already experienced.

 

[senseless]

AMD makes up for it in single thread processing.. I do a lot of programming and always have 10-20 different windows open aswell as playing music or a movie. Haven't had any problems in those areas of performance.. Plus i can play Starwars Galaxies at 1600x1200 @ max graphics aswell as Counterstrike Source @ 1024x768 @ max graphics w/o any slow downs.. Usually get 120fps in cs and 30fps in SWG when im running both at once. Its more video card than processor, but there is still a lot of cpu processing going on.

In order to get gains over intel processors you're going to want to get a 3200+ venice 939.

 

[MrBebop26]

AMD makes up for it with a wider bus, 64-bit, to bad its not taken full use of yet.

-Ryan

 

[Sport1031]

The new dual cores will be much better at multi tasking than previous AMDs. Look for Manchester (I think) and San Deigo cores.

 

[Codeine]

Dont forget that Intels HT is not compatible with every program. I would say somewhere around 40% of prgrams are not compatible with dual core processing. Which is how Intels HT works. But for AMD's HTT, everything is compatible. They also have SSE3.

 

[horndude]

SSE3 wont help that much, Intel has an advantage with larger cache, and HT does help up to a point, but its far less noticable in other OS's that have far better task schedulers than the windows kernel.SSE3 is an instruction set extension, nothing more,nothing less.

If the Intel HT scheme is indeed the real thing, it is comaptible with ANY program period, whether or not the program in question is multithreaded is another issue entirely, but if the program(s) present enough load to the CPU it should split them into separate threads on its own if it can.

 

[senseless]

It isnt compatible with everything.. Some of the audio systems i build need HT turned off in order to get some programs to work correctly.

 

[horndude]

Then Intel's voodoo hyperthreading is indeed marketing hype and junk then isnt it?OR, its case of software that just isnt compatible with multiprocessing.I would think it would be far better to handle multiple threads and scheduling at the kernel level rather than the processor level to begin with, but both microsoft and Intel have a long history of collaboration which in many cases has hurt the industry more than its helped it.