Hyper-threading (officially Hyper-Threading Technology, and abbreviated HT Technology, HTT or HT) is Intel's term for its simultaneous multithreading implementation in its Atom, Intel Core i3/i5/i7, Itanium, Pentium 4 and Xeon CPUs.
Hyper-threading is an Intel-proprietary technology used to improve parallelization of computations (doing multiple tasks at once) performed on PC microprocessors. For each processor core that is physically present, the operating system addresses two virtual processors, and shares the workload between them when possible. The main function of hyper-threading is to decrease the number of dependent instructions on the pipeline.
Hyper-threading requires not only that the operating system support multiple processors, but also that it be specifically optimized for HTT, and Intel recommends disabling HTT when using operating systems that have not been optimized for this chip feature.
