What does the number of cores and threads of a CPU mean?

The number of cores of a CPU refers to the number of processor cores of the CPU, which refers to how many physical cores there are inside the CPU; and the number of threads refers to the number of threads on the same processor executing simultaneously and sharing the processor. The number of threads executing the resource. Processor multi-threading can prepare more data to be processed for the high-speed computing core and reduce the idle time of the computing core.

The operating environment of this tutorial: Windows 7 system, Dell G3 computer.

CPU core introduction

The number of CPU cores refers to how many physical cores there are inside. Each core can be treated as a single-core CPU, and a dual-core CPU is It is equivalent to two sets of hardware resources combined in one box. The number of cores is quite easy to understand. What is more difficult to understand is the number of threads. Please see below.

Introduction to CPU threads

The number of threads a CPU has originally corresponds to the number of cores, that is, there are as many threads as there are cores in the CPU, but Intel has In 2002, a hyper-threading technology was released, which uses special hardware instructions to simulate a CPU core into two logical cores. In this way, when processing some multi-threaded tasks, parallel processing of data can be achieved, greatly improving computing performance. Efficiency enables the CPU's performance to be fully utilized. But the simulated core is not a real physical core after all, and the overall performance is still not as good as a real multi-core CPU.

Because the number of threads of the CPU refers to the number of threads that multiple threads on the same processor execute simultaneously and share the execution resources of the processor.

Explanation:

The processor core (Core), also known as the kernel, is the most important component of the CPU.

The bulging chip in the center of the CPU is the core, which is made of monocrystalline silicon using a certain production process. All calculations, acceptance/storage commands, and data processing of the CPU are performed by the core.

Multiple threads of the processor can maximize the realization of wide-issue, out-of-order superscalar processing, improve the utilization of the processor's computing components, and alleviate the problem of data dependence or Cache Memory access delay caused by miss.

Benefits of multiple threads on a processor:

1. The most attractive thing about multiple threads on a processor is that it only requires Small changes to the design of the processor core can significantly improve performance at almost no additional cost.

　2. Multi-threading technology can prepare more data to be processed for the high-speed computing core and reduce the idle time of the computing core. This is undoubtedly very attractive for low-end desktop systems.

The benefits of multiple processor cores:

1. Intel engineers have developed multi-core chips to meet "horizontal expansion" (rather than "vertical expansion") ) method to improve performance. This architecture enables a “divide and conquer” strategy.

　2. By dividing tasks, threaded applications can make full use of multiple execution cores and perform more tasks within a specific time.

　3. A multi-core processor is a single chip (also called a "silicon core") that can be directly inserted into a single processor socket, but the operating system will utilize all related resources to convert each of its Each execution core acts as a separate logical processor. By dividing tasks between two execution cores, multi-core processors can perform more tasks in a given clock cycle.

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