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Yeah, the new P4's have two logical "processors" in one chip.
This allows for running two parallell threads of instructions instead of a single thread. They share all the processing units within the chip since many usually are idle when runnning only one thread of instructions. To Windows XP it looks like two chips.
You can usually turn it off in bios, but I have not seen it to have any drawbacks in published tests. The main thread will get all the power it needs when needed, the secondary takes the rest.
So it gives you some improved multitasking on some operating systems (like WinXP), and for some applications written for multi-threading. This can give up to 30% performance increase, under optimal conditions.
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