Hyper-threading is Intel’s technology that enables multiprocessor servers to act as if they had twice as many processors installed. its simultaneous multithreading implementation in their Pentium 4, Atom, and Core i7 CPUs. A processor with hyper-threading enabled is treated by the operating system as two processors instead of one. In essence, HT Technology converts a single physical processor into two virtual processors. For more details see Intel’s site.

To find out your processor support Hyper-Threading in Linux, you can see that from cpuinfo in /proc/cpuinfo. For example, below you can see the output taken from the Pentium 4 system :

root@server [~]# cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 15
model           : 4
model name      : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz
stepping        : 1
cpu MHz         : 3000.238
cache size      : 1024 KB
physical id     : 0
siblings        : 2
core id         : 0
cpu cores       : 1
fdiv_bug        : no
hlt_bug         : no
f00f_bug        : no
coma_bug        : no
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 5
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe constant_tsc pebs bts sync_rdtsc pni monitor ds_cpl cid xtpr
bogomips        : 6003.25
clflush size    : 64

Inside the flags section we are looking for a “ht” flag. If it is present, this means that the system supports HT.

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