Intel CEO Confirms SMT To Return to Future CPUs
Source : TechPowerUp
Publié le : vendredi 25 juillet 2025 à 05:48
Intel today announced its Q2 results, and it was a bit of a mixed bag, with the earnings largely down and projections showing little overall growth for the foreseeable future. Ahead of this announcement, though, Intel's CEO, Lip Bu Tan, sent an internal memorandum to employees, which has since been made public, detailing his plan to "step in the right direction." While much of this revolved around AI, its foundry business, and job cuts—a 15% cut in overall head count and a 50% cut in management layers—one of the more relevant takeaways for the PC enthusiast community is that Intel will be reintroducing SMT or Hyper-Threading to its processors in the future. It's unclear whether the change to reintroduce SMT, aka as "Hyper-Threading", will only apply to the data center, since it was only called out when talking about that segment, but generally the desktop and data center are not too far apart in terms of architecture, so it stands to reason that if SMT returns to Intel's data center CPUs, it will likely make its way back to the desktop, too. Intel first started moving away from Hyper-Threading around the 12th-Gen CPUs, around the same time as the company moved towards asymmetrical CPU designs, first enabling SMT on only performance cores and later ditching Hyper-Threading entirely in the 15th-Gen CPUs. It's already clear that reintroducing SMT won't happen with Nova Lake, or likely even its successor, and as we've recently shown in our testing, it isn't always a necessary feature for high performance—especially in gaming—but most PC enthusiasts would probably rather have it and be able to disable it than outright not have the option. Read full story