2 CPUs? Glitch?

Question

Right now I'm using a Pentium 4 Mobile HT 3.21 GHz, it's of course is a single core. Anyway, Windows (Dxdiag and the task manager) keeps saying it's '2 CPUs', It shows up as "Intel Mobile Pentium 4 (2 CPUs)." Is this a glitch or something?

Answer 1

Hyper Threading (HT) is a technology of intel processor to make it looks as if it has 2 processor. It doesn't have 2 cores, just duplicate certain parts in the prefetch stages.

Anyway, the effect is that the operating system will see two processor, and so it can dispatch multiple threads to each processor it sees. The HT CPU improve its performance by being able to fetch 2 different threads simultaneously.

BTW, its not a glitch. It's suppose to be that way =)

Answer 2

The answer above is correct. I hate it and turn it off when I had such computers. It does help for some/most applications, but is bad sometimes. The setting can be changed in the bios whether to use HyperThreading. At boot up before Windows even starts its work, you should be prompted to press F2 or F8 or something else to enter the bios.