Intel'S Core i7-9700K Abandons Hyper-Threading: What It Could Mean For Performance

Intel’s 9th-gen gives the Core i7 a demotion in threads, but a promotion in actual cores.

- Gordon Mah Ung

Core i7, the boss wants to talk to you.The good news: you got a promotion and a bump from six cores up to eight cores in Intel’s 9th-generation CPU lineup (see page 7). Woo-hoo! The bad news: Turn in your HyperThreading, because the cool feature that gave you virtualized CPU cores and about 30 percent more performance is gone.

Yup. If you’re freaked out about the Core i7 losing a premier performance-boosting feature that it’s offered since, well, there was a Core i7, you may well be right to be concerned. But you may not be, too, depending on how you use your computer.

Intel first introduced Hyper-Threading on consumer CPUs with the Northwood-based Pentium 4 in 2002. It works by splitting a single physical core into two logical cores. Since most compute threads don’t consume 100 percent of a CPU’s resources, HyperThreading lets the unused resources do work as well. Hyper-Threading, of course, is Intel’s fancy-pants name for simultaneous multi threading, which AMD also began employing with its Ryzen chips (go.pcworld.com/27rv).

Although Hyper-Threading’s performance boost has been around for 16 years, it hasn’t always been tapped into. No Core 2 CPUs ever used the feature, for example, and Intel’s Atom CPUs have had it off and on.