Intel Releases New Patches For Thread Director Virtualization, Offers an Impressive 14% Performance Uplift

Intel's Thread Director Virtualization, responsible for "hybrid" core handling, has debuted on Linux, boasting an impressive performance bump.

Intel's Thread Director helps improve the performance of the company's hybrid P-Core and E-Core processors by intelligently directing workloads to the right cores at the right time. It is designed to work with Intel's hybrid core architecture, which combines high-performance P-cores with more efficient E-cores. It's Intel's way of providing a path for its cores to work together to output optimal performance. Intel's new set of patches has finally brought the feature onto Linux, along with several Linux kernel improvements to make task handling more efficient.

Phoronix discloses that the new set of patches introduced by Team Blue has not only brought in advanced support for Thread Director, but the firm has also focused on running Virtual Machines (VMs) on Intel's hybrid systems through Thread Director Virtualization. It is a common fact that the use of VMs, especially for Linux host systems, has been quite widespread since it allows consumers to interact with multiple OS simultaneously. Through revamping virtualization on Intel systems, it is reported that task management has become a lot more effective, resulting in around 14% better performance.

The testing was done on the 3DMark benchmark utilizing a Windows VM, and overall, the virtualization experience will get a lot better with Intel hybrid systems. Here is how the patches have described the new update:

In short, the purpose of this patch set is to enable the ITD-based scheduling logic in Guest so that Guest can better schedule Guest tasks on Intel hybrid platforms.

Currently, ITD is necessary for Windows VMs. Based on ITD virtualization support, the Windows 11 Guest could have significant performance improvement (for example, on i9-13900K, up to 14%+ improvement on 3DMARK).

With this set of patches, it is expected that we might see further updates focusing on optimizing the performance of Intel's hybrid core CPUs at Linux.

News Source: Phoronix