This article is worthless.  There are no technical details at all, and the FUD is mostly wrong.<p>The idea of Hyperthreading is to keep the processor utilized at all times.  Modern processors have many different components for each core, and not every thread of execution uses all the components.  Enabling Hyperthreading lets the OS supply the processor with more work, potentially reducing the amount of the processor that's unused at any time.<p>The article is right about reducing performance.  If you have an 8 core machine, and you have one app that only runs on one core (hello, kcrypd...), it will run slower than "normal" when you have 7 other jobs using the CPU.  But, if you have a job that scales linearly across cores, then you will almost always see a speed increase.  (I tested this on my machine with a "make" on the Linux kernel.  The CPU time used by the whole build is the same when you run with -j1 to -j4.  The wall-clock time decreases linearly.  When you start adding "hyper" threads, you see the wall-clock time decrease more slowly, but the CPU time <i>increase</i>.  This, I think, is what scares people.  The processor becomes slower as you add threads beyond the number of actual cores, but its overall throughput increases.<p>I can't think of any workloads where this is a bad thing.  I don't know of any server workload that leans heavily on one thread.  (Databases, maybe.)  On a workstation, you are only going to "starve" normal processes when you are intentionally doing something intensive, like encoding video.  For normal workloads, you will never use even the 4 real cores completely.<p>(As I type this post, the only things that could possibly want to run are kcryptd, my music player, the X server, and the web browser.  Hyperthreading is enabled, but there is no way I can possibly get the processor into the state where it starts slowing down.  But when I run "make -j8", I really enjoy the speed benefit at the expense of making firefox 3% slower.)<p>Anyway, Google around for various benchmarks showing the results of Hyperthreading enabled and disabled, and I think you'll want to enable it.  I did my own, and I'm glad I did -- it even makes my eeepc slightly faster!