[mistercow]

That was the impression I had too, but if so I can see how "this is actually what hyperthreading is all about" would make sense. Two streams of code are unlikely to have long segments of just-FPU and just-integer respectively, and even more unlikely that those streams will happen to align during execution. It happens, sure, but the gains would be smallish.

On the other hand, long periods of no cache misses followed by long periods of waiting after a cache miss are exactly what you expect from real code (especially optimized code). So I'd think that you'd have much bigger gains from that. The same goes for branch misprediction.

[mikeash]

Well, the gains are smallish. Real-world gains from hyperthreading are on the order of 10-20% when you load up a CPU with two threads.

[mistercow]

Yeah, but when I said "smallish" I was thinking more on the order of 1%. I would consider 10% actual gains to be quite large given the craziness of what Hyperthreading tries to accomplish.

[mikeash]

It may also be a matter of more fully utilizing multiple integer/floating-point units. Say, if the CPU has two integer units but the current code is only using up one of them, then it could run the second hyperthread on the other. I really don't know the details though.