Kaby Lake Pentium processors now include Hyperthreading
Intel breaks tradition and will now be offering Hyperthreading outside of its Core ix family for consumers. Future Pentium CPUs based on Kaby Lake are now expected to carry the same multi-threading technology for much faster performance.
After an unconfirmed forum post on Hardware.info claiming that Intel Pentium CPUs would soon carry Hyperthreading, it wasn't long until Intel themselves confirmed the rumor. The new desktop Kaby Lake Pentium G4560, G4560T, G4600T, and G4520 will all have Hyperthreading technology not unlike its costlier Core ix siblings. This should improve performance significantly for multimedia and multi-tasking workloads and boost the performance-per-Dollar of the inexpensive 60 to 90 USD Pentium processors. At the same time, however, the faster Core i3 series may be less appealing since Hyperthreading has been a major differentiating factor between the two series. The move could be seen as a proactive response to AMD Ryzen and to further solidify Intel as the go-to brand for performance even at the budget level.
Intel Hyperthreading technology duplicates certain parts of the processor at the silicon level to allow for multiple independent instructions per core. Thus, a dual-core CPU can be recognized as a quad-core processor by an operating system. The chipmaker claims a performance increase of up to 33 percent depending on the application with Hyperthreading.
Allen Ngo - Lead Editor U.S. - 5190 articles published on Notebookcheck since 2011
After graduating with a B.S. in environmental hydrodynamics from the University of California, I studied reactor physics to become licensed by the U.S. NRC to operate nuclear reactors. There's a striking level of appreciation you gain for everyday consumer electronics after working with modern nuclear reactivity systems astonishingly powered by computers from the 80s. When I'm not managing day-to-day activities and US review articles on Notebookcheck, you can catch me following the eSports scene and the latest gaming news.