thinQmaster Virtual testing partner Adaptive practice exams that find your weak spots and drill them. Every answer explained. From $69
Enroll

thinQmaster

Find your exam

Five questions free, before you decide.

Step 1 · choose a vendor

In one of our camps? Your practice exams come with the tuition — they are on your study page already.

Systems & Data Center · Intermediate

Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT)

A CPU feature that lets each physical core run two hardware threads, presenting more logical processors to the OS.

Definition

Intel calls SMT Hyper-Threading. It improves throughput for many workloads but does not double performance, since threads share core resources. Licensing and VM sizing usually count physical cores.

Example

A 32-core CPU with SMT enabled appears as 64 logical processors.

Exam tip

A logical processor from SMT is not equivalent to a physical core for capacity planning.

Related terms