Live Session: How Hyper-Threading (Simultaneous Multithreading) Works — A Microarchitectural Perspective
Learn about the microarchitecture implementation of SMT & its performance implications
Have you ever wondered how Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) works at the hardware level? Or thought about its impact on your code's performance, such as whether it can affect single-threaded applications?
Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT), also known as Hyper-Threading (HT), is a hardware feature available on many modern processors that enables a single processor core to execute two threads simultaneously. This technology improves instruction throughput and can significantly boost system performance.
In our next live session, we will answer these questions by exploring the microarchitectural implementation of SMT in Intel CPUs. Apart from covering how SMT works, this discussion will provide you with a thorough overview of the microarchitecture of the x86 CPUs, and offer a deep understanding of how your program's instructions are executed. This knowledge is extremely useful for performing low-level performance optimizations and squeezing out every bit of efficiency from the CPU.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
What is simultaneous multithreading (SMT) & motivation behind its introduction in CPUs
A brief background on the CPU microarchitecture
How SMT instruction execution works at the microarchitecture level, we will cover:
Instruction fetch & decode
ITLB and branch prediction
Uop queue
Out-of-order execution engine
Instruction scheduling & retirement
Memory access
If you are not familiar with these microarchitecture details of the CPU, this talk will be a good first introduction.
Date & Time
July 6th, 16:30 to 18:00 UTC
Logistics
The session is free for all paid subscribers. You can RSVP at the link in the next section. If you are not a paid subscriber, you can upgrade and access the link.
However, if you are just interested in this one session, then consider buying the one-time ticket. The membership is heavily discounted to encourage long-term subscription, so please don’t take advantage of that.
Note, that I will do this only if a minimum quorum of 10 people is met, otherwise it’s not worth my time to do this.
Payment Issues on Substack
If you have trouble in paying for the membership on Substack, you can opt for sponsoring me on GitHub, or becoming a member at buymeacoffee, and I will upgrade you to a paid subscription here.
RSVP
To register, please RSVP at the below link to receive the zoom meeting details: