About

Processing performance of computers is increased by using multi-core processors, which essentially is plugging two or more individual processor (called cores in this sense) into one integrated circuit.

“processor” and “processor package” are often synonymous.

Ideally, a dual core processor would be nearly twice as powerful as a single core processor. In practice, however, the performance gain is far less, only about fifty percent,due to, e.g.:

  • imperfect software algorithms
  • and implementation.

An individual processing unit that is capable of executing instructions and doing computational work.

the terms CPU and core are intended to mean the same thing. A “Quad-Core” processor implies four cores, or CPU’s, per processor package

.

Concurrency

A computer system normally has many active processes and threads. This is true even in systems that only have a single execution core, and thus only have one thread actually executing at any given moment.

Concurrency is possible even on simple systems, without multiple processors or execution cores.

Processing time for a single core is shared among processes and threads through an OS feature called time slicing.

Properties

word length

See word length (8, 32 or 64 bit)

Number of core

Redhat

grep 'model name' /proc/cpuinfo | wc -l

40

The max cpu load is then 40

Aix

lsdev -C -c processor 

proc0  Available 00-00 Processor
proc4  Available 00-04 Processor
proc8  Available 00-08 Processor
proc12 Defined   00-12 Processor