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While many questions on hardware multithreading on SuperUser will concern Intel's Hyper-Threading, a significant fraction concern hardware multithreading more generally. (Those concerning actual Hyper-Threading could generally merely add the Intel tag to clarify the specificity, though some Intel products use multithreading but are not marketed as Hyper-Threading, e.g., Xeon Phi.)

In some cases, the poster of the question is not aware that Hyper-Threading is Intel-specific (and a marketing rather than technical term), so making a synonym for would make distinguishing Intel-specific (or more specifically Hyper-Threading specific) questions from more general hardware multithreading questions difficult (unless a more informed person added the Intel tag) but would allow generic hardware multithreading questions to be more accurately tagged.

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    Four questions per year and potentially less for hardware-multithreading isn't really worth the effort IMO.
    – qasdfdsaq
    Commented Jan 25, 2016 at 17:42
  • This seems like a candidate for widespread misuse. Some people will pick the correct tag, but I'm guessing both tags would accumulate questions that should use the other (apparently, that's already happening with only [hyper-threading] available). Added an [intel] manufacturer meta tag to the question isn't a good solution. if two tags are warranted, they should probably be [intel-hyper-threading] and [hardware-multithreading], with usage guidance in the wiki excerpts. If we only need one, it should be the more generic [hardware-multithreading].
    – fixer1234
    Commented Jan 26, 2016 at 3:54
  • @fixer1234 That is why I was suggesting a synonym (which deprecates the hyper-threading tag, translating its use to the more generic hardware-multithreading). (I am not sure why using the Intel tag as a meta tag is so bad; [intel][hardware-multithreading] would include Xeon Phi which seems more appropriate.) Sadly, tag wikis seem to be relatively ineffective in encouraging proper use. I recognize that this is a quibble on technical use of terms. Also, SU might be culturally friendlier to marketing terms (vs. technical terms); software-oriented SO uses [hyperthreading].
    – user180742
    Commented Jan 26, 2016 at 5:00
  • re: the manufacturer meta tags, see the discussion on meta.superuser.com/questions/8402/…. [intel] is on the list for deprecation.
    – fixer1234
    Commented Jan 26, 2016 at 6:28
  • @fixer1234 Interesting. That thread would indicate that [intel-cpu] would be the alternative to use (though that seems rather broad as an expert in Intel Core-based processors is not likely to be familiar with Xeon Phi, which mainly compete with GPGPU in HPC, or Itanium, which is nearly dead now and questions would probably be better directed to ServerFault anyway). [x86] would probably be an adequate tag currently.
    – user180742
    Commented Jan 26, 2016 at 16:14

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