Technically, hyperthreading takes advantage of additional registers--circuits that help manage data inside a chip--that come on existing Pentium 4's but aren't used. Through these registers, the processor can handle more tasks at once by taking better advantage of its own resources. The chip can direct instructions from one application on its floating-point unit, which is where the heavy math is done, and run parts of another application through its integer unit.

A chip with hyperthreading won't equal the computing power of two Pentium 4's, but the performance boost is substantial, Poulin said. A workstation with hyperthreaded Xeon chips running Alias-Wavefront, a graphics application, has achieved a 30 percent improvement in tests, he said. Servers with hyperthreaded chips can manage 30 percent more users.