▷ How to know how many cores my processor has

In this article we will help you to know how to know how many cores my processor has. With the latest releases of AMD and Intel processors we have seen the arrival of models that offer us up to eight processing cores within the domestic range, an impressive leap if we take into account that until just over a year ago Intel offered us at most four cores in their processors.

Index of contents

How many cores does your PC have?

With the arrival of the new Coffee Lake processors from Intel and Ryzen from AMD, mounting a quad or six core PC is very affordable. So how many cores do you have on your current machine? In this article, we will show you the different methods you can use to determine the core count in your processor.

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What is a processor core?

The first step in understanding the importance of processor cores is understanding what this important component is. The main component in any PC 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 has a single core. If a processor can process two sets of instructions at the same time, then it is considered a dual core processor. If you can process four sets of instructions simultaneously, then it is a quad core processor. The more cores a processor has, the more instruction sets it can process at the same time.

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The core is the part of the processor where all the calculations are made, so it is the most important. Until 2005 all processors were single-core, but since then the trend has been to increase the number of cores. Currently, the best processors from AMD and Intel offer up to 32 cores, a lot.

Look at the number of cores on your PC from Task Manager

The easiest way to see how many cores you have is to open Task Manager s. You can press the keyboard shortcut CTRL + SHIFT + ESC or you can right-click the Start button and choose it from there. Click on the Performance tab and you will see various charts on the left side along with more charts and information on the right side. Click on the CPU and you will see the CPU utilization graph. By default, it displays a single chart, but you can change it by right-clicking on the chart and selecting Change Chart For and then selecting Logical Processors.

However, in Windows 10, you don't really have to change the graph, as it tells you how many logical sockets, cores, and processors are in the system. In my case, I have a socket, which means I have physical CPU. I have two physical and four logical cores, which means it is a dual core processor with Hyper-Threading. It also provides information about the L1 cache, the L2 cache, and the L3 cache. These are specialized CPU caches that allow instructions to be stored for faster processing.

System information

Another easy way to get information about your CPU without any software is to use the System Information dialog in Windows. Just click Start and type "system info." By default, the system summary should be automatically selected. On the right side, you will see a list of articles that will inform about your PC. You should see one or more processor related lines. If you have more than one CPU, it will list each on a separate line. So now I can say that my machine has a CPU with 2 cores.

Using third-party software

Another way to know the number of cores of your processor is to use third-party software, Speccy is one of our favorites, since it is free, very light and easy to use. This application provides us with a large amount of information about our PC, although what interests us this time is the core count.

As a bonus we leave you another great software to know the number of cores of a PC's processor, this is HWMonitor. This tool is incredible, since it allows us to control a multitude of parameters such as the temperature of the different components of our PC and many details. What interests us in this case is the number of cores and threads of the processor.

This ends our article on how to know how many cores my processor has, we hope you liked it and helped you better understand the specifications of your PC. You can share the article on social networks so that it can help more users who need it.