Improve doc on multi-threading and warn about hyper-threading

1 files changed, 23 insertions, 11 deletions

diff --git a/doc/TopicMultithreading.dox b/doc/TopicMultithreading.dox
index bc394f484..97190b5a8 100644
--- a/doc/TopicMultithreading.dox
+++ b/doc/TopicMultithreading.dox
@@ -4,22 +4,25 @@ namespace Eigen {
 
 \section TopicMultiThreading_MakingEigenMT Make Eigen run in parallel
 
-Some Eigen's algorithms can exploit the multiple cores present in your hardware. To this end, it is enough to enable OpenMP on your compiler, for instance:
- * GCC: \c -fopenmp
- * ICC: \c -openmp
- * MSVC: check the respective option in the build properties.
-You can control the number of thread that will be used using either the OpenMP API or Eigen's API using the following priority:
+Some %Eigen's algorithms can exploit the multiple cores present in your hardware.
+To this end, it is enough to enable OpenMP on your compiler, for instance:
+ - GCC: \c -fopenmp
+ - ICC: \c -openmp
+ - MSVC: check the respective option in the build properties.
+
+You can control the number of threads that will be used using either the OpenMP API or %Eigen's API using the following priority:
 \code
  OMP_NUM_THREADS=n ./my_program
  omp_set_num_threads(n);
  Eigen::setNbThreads(n);
 \endcode
-Unless setNbThreads has been called, Eigen uses the number of threads specified by OpenMP. You can restore this behavior by calling \code setNbThreads(0); \endcode
+Unless `setNbThreads` has been called, %Eigen uses the number of threads specified by OpenMP.
+You can restore this behavior by calling `setNbThreads(0);`.
 You can query the number of threads that will be used with:
 \code
 n = Eigen::nbThreads( );
 \endcode
-You can disable Eigen's multi threading at compile time by defining the EIGEN_DONT_PARALLELIZE preprocessor token.
+You can disable %Eigen's multi threading at compile time by defining the \link TopicPreprocessorDirectivesPerformance EIGEN_DONT_PARALLELIZE \endlink preprocessor token.
 
 Currently, the following algorithms can make use of multi-threading:
  - general dense matrix - matrix products
@@ -29,9 +32,17 @@ Currently, the following algorithms can make use of multi-threading:
  - BiCGSTAB with a row-major sparse matrix format.
  - LeastSquaresConjugateGradient
 
+\warning On most OS it is <strong>very important</strong> to limit the number of threads to the number of physical cores, otherwise significant slowdowns are expected, especially for operations involving dense matrices.
+
+Indeed, the principle of hyper-threading is to run multiple threads (in most cases 2) on a single core in an interleaved manner.
+However, %Eigen's matrix-matrix product kernel is fully optimized and already exploits nearly 100% of the CPU capacity.
+Consequently, there is no room for running multiple such threads on a single core, and the performance would drops significantly because of cache pollution and other sources of overheads.
+At this stage of reading you're probably wondering why %Eigen does not limit itself to the number of physical cores?
+This is simply because OpenMP does not allow to know the number of physical cores, and thus %Eigen will launch as many threads as <i>cores</i> reported by OpenMP.
+
 \section TopicMultiThreading_UsingEigenWithMT Using Eigen in a multi-threaded application
 
-In the case your own application is multithreaded, and multiple threads make calls to Eigen, then you have to initialize Eigen by calling the following routine \b before creating the threads:
+In the case your own application is multithreaded, and multiple threads make calls to %Eigen, then you have to initialize %Eigen by calling the following routine \b before creating the threads:
 \code
 #include <Eigen/Core>
 
@@ -43,11 +54,12 @@ int main(int argc, char** argv)
 }
 \endcode
 
-\note With Eigen 3.3, and a fully C++11 compliant compiler (i.e., <a href="http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/storage_duration#Static_local_variables">thread-safe static local variable initialization</a>), then calling \c initParallel() is optional.
+\note With %Eigen 3.3, and a fully C++11 compliant compiler (i.e., <a href="http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/storage_duration#Static_local_variables">thread-safe static local variable initialization</a>), then calling \c initParallel() is optional.
 
-\warning note that all functions generating random matrices are \b not re-entrant nor thread-safe. Those include DenseBase::Random(), and DenseBase::setRandom() despite a call to Eigen::initParallel(). This is because these functions are based on std::rand which is not re-entrant. For thread-safe random generator, we recommend the use of boost::random or c++11 random feature.
+\warning Note that all functions generating random matrices are \b not re-entrant nor thread-safe. Those include DenseBase::Random(), and DenseBase::setRandom() despite a call to `Eigen::initParallel()`. This is because these functions are based on `std::rand` which is not re-entrant.
+For thread-safe random generator, we recommend the use of c++11 random generators (\link DenseBase::NullaryExpr(Index, const CustomNullaryOp&) example \endlink) or `boost::random`.
 
-In the case your application is parallelized with OpenMP, you might want to disable Eigen's own parallelization as detailed in the previous section.
+In the case your application is parallelized with OpenMP, you might want to disable %Eigen's own parallelization as detailed in the previous section.
 
 */