hyperthreading - technical definition

(1) A high-performance computing architecture that simulates some degree of overlap in executing two or more independent sets of instructions. See Hyper-Threading.

(2) (Hyper-Threading) A feature of certain Pentium 4 chips that makes one physical CPU appear as two logical CPUs. It uses additional registers to overlap two instruction streams in order to achieve an approximate 30% gain in performance. Multithreaded applications take advantage of the Hyper-Threaded hardware as they would on any dual-processor system; however, the performance gain cannot equal that of true dual-processor CPUs.