What happens if you have more threads than cores?

Having more threads than cores means useful work can be done while high-latency tasks are resolved. The CPU has a thread scheduler that assigns priority to each thread, and allows a thread to sleep, then resume after a predetermined time.

What is the benefit of having more threads?

The benefit of having more cores/threads is for more multithreaded programs or games that are starting to use more then 4 cores such as newer Battlefield titles.

Can you have more than 2 threads per core?

Simultaneous multithreading (SMT) is one of the two main implementations of multithreading, the other form being temporal multithreading (also known as super-threading). Two concurrent threads per CPU core are common, but some processors support up to eight concurrent threads per core.

Is more thread count better for gaming?

If the game can use exactly 6 cores then having more threads is useful because then Windows and other background processes can run on them. Also, even though it is rare today, some games will run better on a 6 core 6 thread CPU than a 6 core 12 thread CPU because of poor usage of ‘real’ threads versus ‘fake’ threads.

What is the advantage of having more threads than cores?

Having more threads than cores means useful work can be done while high-latency tasks are resolved. The CPU has a thread scheduler that assigns priority to each thread, and allows a thread to sleep, then resume after a predetermined time.

Why can’t I run multiple threads on a single core?

Because running more than 2 threads on a single core would increase core complexity without improving performance. Even having 2 threads running simultaneous on a single CPU core is not universal. CPU cores were originally designed to run 1 thread at a time.

How many threads can hyperthreading run at the same time?

So a CPU core with hyperthreading can run 2 threads at the same time. Now we finally come to your question: why does hyperthreading limit itself to 2 threads? why not more? The answer is that a single hyperthreading core running 2 threads is nowhere near as fast as two separate cores running these same threads.

What is the minimum number of threads one core can support?

What you really want to achieve is the minimum number of threads such that at least one thread per core can always be running. 1 thread per core is not the optimum. It needs to be slightly more, preferably twice that since this will allow another thread to run if a thread is temporarily blocked. Even if only on memory.