Multithreading

In computer architecture, multithreading is the ability of a central processing unit (CPU) (or a single core in a multi-core processor) to provide multiple threads of execution concurrently, supported by the operating system. This approach differs from multiprocessing. In a multithreaded application, the threads share the resources of a single or multiple cores, which include the computing units, the CPU caches, and the translation lookaside buffer (TLB).

Where multiprocessing systems include multiple complete processing units in one or more cores, multithreading aims to increase utilization of a single core by using thread-level parallelism, as well as instruction-level parallelism. As the two techniques are complementary, they are combined in nearly all modern systems architectures with multiple multithreading CPUs and with CPUs with multiple multithreading cores.

Advantages[edit]

If a thread gets a lot of cache misses, the other threads can continue taking advantage of the unused computing resources, which may lead to faster overall execution, as these resources would have been idle if only a single thread were executed. Also, if a thread cannot use all the computing resources of the CPU (because instructions depend on each other's result), running another thread may prevent those resources from becoming idle.

Disadvantages[edit]

Multiple threads can interfere with each other when sharing hardware resources such as caches or translation lookaside buffers (TLBs). As a result, execution times of a single thread are not improved and can be degraded, even when only one thread is executing, due to lower frequencies or additional pipeline stages that are necessary to accommodate thread-switching hardware.

Overall efficiency varies; Intel claims up to 30% improvement with its Hyper-Threading Technology,[1] while a synthetic program just performing a loop of non-optimized dependent floating-point operations actually gains a 100% speed improvement when run in parallel. On the other hand, hand-tuned assembly language programs using MMX or AltiVec extensions and performing data prefetches (as a good video encoder might) do not suffer from cache misses or idle computing resources. Such programs therefore do not benefit from hardware multithreading and can indeed see degraded performance due to contention for shared resources.

From the software standpoint, hardware support for multithreading is more visible to software, requiring more changes to both application programs and operating systems than multiprocessing. Hardware techniques used to support multithreading often parallel the software techniques used for computer multitasking. Thread scheduling is also a major problem in multithreading.