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multi-threading

Poorly designed downloader

The Internet contains an abundance of entertaining and educational content in both audio and video formats, and sooner or later almost everyone finds themselves wanting to download such content for later use. Fortunately for all of us, many programs have cropped up in recent years to help us with this task. HiDownload is one such program; but, we're sorry to say, it's not nearly as user-friendly as some others we've encountered.

The program's interface is plain and doesn't offer a whole lot in the way of direction. Some of the features were pretty easy to … Read more

Multi-threading reviewed

I've been getting a fair number of questions about multi-threading the past couple of weeks. The reason is that Intel has been previewing its "Nehalem EX" Xeon processor in advance of Advanced Micro Device's six-core "Istanbul" CPU launch. Intel's Nehalem generation has simultaneous multi-threading (SMT)--which Intel calls Hyper-Threading (HT)--while Istanbul does not.

I wrote about this topic in depth a couple of years back in "Gradations of Threading," but it's worth reviewing in the context of these new server processors.

First, a little terminology.

A thread is a … Read more