With the latest releases of Intel processors, it’s safe to say that in the near future, most consumer desktops will have machines with 2, 4 and even 6 cores.
With Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake and Cannon Lake on the horizon, a quad-core consumer PC will be very affordable. So how many cores do you have on your current machine? In this article, I will show you various methods that you can use to determine the number of cores on your PC.
What is the kernel?
The main component of any computer is the CPU, which stands for central processing unit. The CPU receives instructions and then performs calculations. If a processor can only process one set of instructions at a time, that means it only has one core.
If a processor can process two sets of instructions at the same time, it is considered a dual-core processor. If it can process four sets of instructions at the same time, then it is a quad-core processor. The more cores a processor has, the more instruction sets it can process at one time.
Task Manager
The easiest way to find out how many cores you have is to open the Task Manager. You can press CTRL + SHIFT + ESC keys or right-click the Start button and select it from there. On Windows 7, you can press CTRL + ALT + DELETE and open it from there.
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Go to the Performance tab and you will see some graphs on the left side, as well as additional graphs and information on the right side. Click on CPU and you will see the CPU usage graph.
By default, a single graph is displayed, but you can change it by right-clicking the graph and choosing Change Graph To, and then choosing Logical Processors.
However, in Windows 10, you don’t really need to change the graph as it shows how many sockets, cores, and logical processors there are on the system. In my case, I have one socket, which means I have a physical processor. I have 4 cores, so this is a quad core processor. So, I only have 4 logical processors.
It also gives you information about L1 cache, L2 cache and L3 cache. These are specialized CPU caches that allow the CPU to cache instructions for faster processing.
In Windows 7, the Task Manager looks a little different. First, you need to change the view so that it displays one graph for each processor. This is the only way to find out how many cores a CPU has in Windows 7 using the Task Manager.
Click View, then CPU History, and then Single Graph for CPU. You should now be able to see how many logical processors you have.
Using the Task Manager in Windows 7, you can see how many cores you have in total, but you cannot tell how many processors you have or how many cores each processor has.
system information
Another easy way to get information about your CPU or CPUS without any software is to use the System Information dialog box in Windows. Just click “Start” and enter the system information. By default, System Summary should be selected automatically.
On the right, you’ll see a list of items that tell you about your computer. You should see one or more lines related to the specified processor. If you have more than one processor, it will list each on a separate line. So now I can say that I have two processors on my machine, each with two cores.
My other computer also has four cores, but with only one processor. So I have one computer with a quad-core processor and another computer with two dual-core processors. Simple enough, right?
Google and third-party tools
Once you get the exact processor model from the system information, you can also just google and you will get an online spec for that processor (I googled the core i5-4660).
You can also use a free third party program to get all kinds of detailed information about your processor. These programs can also tell you if your processor supports virtualization, vt-x, SSSE3, etc.
The two most popular programs are Speccy and HWiNFO Both programs work very well and give you pretty much everything you can imagine about your hardware.
So, this is a quick and easy way to find out how many cores you have on your PC. Please note that if you are planning to purchase a computer with more than two physical processors, you will need to purchase Windows 10 Pro for Workstations, which has not yet been released. However, a consumer PC rarely needs more than one processor.
Windows 10 can support up to 32 cores for 32-bit Windows and 256 cores for 64-bit Windows. No one will come close to this limit anytime soon! Enjoy!
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