Hyper-Threading Technology has always been a feature of Intel CPUs, but that may be changing in the near future. According to a recent report, Intel's upcoming 15th generation Core "Arrow Lake" desktop processors may do away with Hyper-Threading technology. While earlier rumors hinted at this development, it's a big decision for Intel and may disappoint many potential customers.
The information comes from confidential Intel documents, recently leaked by whistleblower @yuuki_ans (deleted) and highlighted by German website 3DCenter. While initial focus was on the specifications of the Arrow Lake-S chip, a closer look revealed that the processor will likely feature eight performance cores and the same number of threads, but will not support simultaneous multithreading (SMT).
In some cases, eliminating hyper-threading can have a potentially detrimental impact on the performance of ArrowLake chips. While single-threaded performance may not be affected by canceling HT, some multi-threaded applications may experience a slight performance degradation compared to hyper-threaded processors such as Raptor Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh chips.
Fortunately for gamers, removing Hyper-Threading is not expected to impact performance on AAA games. In fact, Intel is reportedly targeting a 30% improvement in gaming performance with its ArrowLake line of products. The company will most likely achieve this through architectural improvements and higher clock speeds, without having to worry about not having extra threads.
Hyper-Threading technology was originally introduced by Intel Corporation in the early 2000s to improve the performance of its single-core Xeon and Pentium 4 processors in multi-threaded workloads. However, the x86 processor landscape has changed significantly since then, and the emergence of multi-core processors means that hyper-threading technology is no longer as important as it was decades ago. Still, Hyper-Threading can help with some heavily threaded applications and can significantly improve performance in some cases.
The original leaked document revealed many details about the upcoming ArrowLake-S chip. First, they could feature up to 8+16+1 core configurations and support DDR5-6400 memory, which would be a nice improvement over the DDR5-5600 memory supported by the 14th-generation product line. The document also shows that ArrowLake-S will support 24 PCIe lanes, including 16 PCIe 5.0 lanes for GPUs and 8 for NVMe SSDs.