If i5 has no hyperthreading why it has more threads than cores

Question

I have read at a lot of places that i5 does not have hyperthreading and that i7 is i5 + hyperthreading. If it is true, how come many i5 processors have more threads than cores(4 cores and 8 threads) as per intel website.?

Answer 1

It depends a lot on the processor generation and engineering choices for the processor.

From experience each generation has broadly followed:

• i3: low core count no hyperthreading
• i5: low core count + hyperthreading
• i5: mid core count no hyperthreading
• i7: mid/high core count + hyperthreading

This is a bit anecdotal, but to say that no i5s have hyperthreading is provably false. It is just that the i5 is the space between the low end and the high end. You can see the above mix particularly in the 5th generation processors.

The line between i3 and i5 has also shifted over the years and I am sure there have been i3s with hyperthreading in some generations.

What I mentioned above should be taken with a grain of salt though, as there are even i7 processors which might lack hyperthreading and ones which might have low core counts, particularly in the mobile markets.

If you want to find out whether any given processor has hyperthreading then you should check https://ark.intel.com/ for the processor.

Any processor which states a thread count higher than the core count has hyperthreading.

Answer 2

Many mobile i5s have Hyper-Threading. Many mobile i3s have Hyper-Threading.

Desktop i5s do not have Hyper-Threading. Desktop i3s also do not have Hyper-Threading.

These links are for the current generation. Many previous generations are similar in this regard, except for desktop i3s: They used to have Hyper-Threading.