What is i7 hyperthreading?

What does hyperthreading really mean?

I am looking at an i7 CPU just to be able to process live uncompressed HDMI live video and audio - would hyperthreading be essential in this set-up?

Thanks all advice appreicated!!

Basically, the OS can look at one core as if it were two.

It can do two things at once on the same core.

The quad core is treated as an eight-core.

thanks for that. I will research more but do you think that this functionality would help me since I am trying to process uncompressed video via HDMI and stream online?

Thanks

It depends on how the program is coded. If it is coded to handle multiple threads then I would say it would help, if it is a single-threaded application then it wouldn't make any difference.

One way to test would be to try uncompressing and see how quickly it does it with your current PC (assuming it is a C2Q, for example) and then disable two of the cores and run it again, and see if you see a big difference. It may not be a perfect way to do it, but it may give some insight if you don't know if the app is multithreaded.