Intel has confirmed that all Kaby Lake Pentium processors will include Hyper-Threading support, creating four logical cores from two physical, but in adding the feature has dropped support for ECC memory. Intel has officially confirmed that it is bringing Hyper-Threading support back to its Pentium family in the Kaby Lake microarchitecture, but in doing so is sacrificing support for Error Correcting Code (ECC) memory.
Named in memory of Intel’s original Pentium family, which launched in 1993 using the P5 microarchitecture as the first microprocessor Intel would launch using a non-numerical product name and the successor to the 80486, Intel’s current Pentium range is designed to offer reasonable performance in budget builds. Sitting below the Core i3 family, the Pentium chips typically have smaller caches, lower clock speeds, fewer cores, and lack support for more advanced features. Among these is Hyper-Threading, Intel’s technology for allowing a single physical core to run two threads simultaneously – effectively doubling the number of logical cores available to multi-threaded or multi-process software.
