Innes Corporation Pty Ltd
3/38 Leighton Pl
Hornsby, NSW 2077, Australia
Phone: +61 2 9987 0499
Fax: +61 2 9987 0599
E-mail:
sales@innescorp.com.au
Website: http://www.innescorp.com.au
14
Auricon 2.2 & 4.1 Manual
Hyperthreading and Audio
Some of the modern processors support hyperthreading, a technology lying midway between
single core and fully independent multiple processor cores. A hyperthreaded processor provides
parallel execution paths for multiple threads, however there remain some shared resources
such as the memory caches and floating point processor.
For most applications this is fine and results in a substantial improvement in performance for a
given processor complexity, however for time-critical audio applications a problem can arise,
when a low-priority thread is using a shared resource that the high-priority audio thread
requires. Since the processor has no concept of thread priorities, the high-priority thread is
blocked until that resource becomes free, resulting in gaps on playback or skipping while
recording.
If this proves to be a problem on a hyperthreaded system, the hyperthreading can usually be
disabled in one of the BIOS settings. Refer to the motherboard or system documentation for
details on how to do this.
