With the latest releases of processors from Intel, it'due south a certainty that about consumer desktops will be running machines with two cores, 4 cores and fifty-fifty 6 cores very soon.

With Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake and Cannon Lake on the horizon, a quad-core consumer PC is going to exist very affordable. So how many cores practise yous have on your current machine? In this article, I'k going to show you the different methods you can utilize to determine the core count on your PC.

What is a Core?

The main component on any figurer is the CPU, which stands for Fundamental Processing Unit. The CPU gets instructions and then performs calculations. If a processor can only process ane prepare of instructions at a unmarried, that means it has only a unmarried core.

If a processor can process ii sets of instructions at the same time, and so information technology is considered a dual-cadre processor. If it can process four sets of instructions simultaneously, then information technology is a quad-core processor. The more cores a processor has, the more sets of instructions it tin process at one time.

Task Manager

The easiest way to see how many cores you lot have is to open up Task Director. You can press the CTRL + SHIFT + ESC keyboard shortcut or you lot can right-click on the Start push button and cull it from at that place. In Windows 7, you lot can press CTRL + ALT + DELETE and open it from there.

Click on the Performance tab and yous'll encounter several graphs on the left-hand side forth with more than graphs and information on the right-paw side. Click on CPU and you'll see the CPU utilization graph.

By default, it shows a single graph, but y'all tin can change that by right-clicking on the graph and choosing Change graph to and then selecting Logical processors.

However, in Windows x, you really don't accept to modify the graph since it tells you how many Sockets, Cores and Logical processors there are in the system. In my case, I have one socket, which means I have on physical CPU. I take iv cores, which ways information technology's a quad-core processor. Then I have a total of 4 logical processors.

It also gives you information about the L1 enshroud, L2 cache and L3 cache. These are specialized caches on the CPU that permit the CPU to cache instructions for faster processing.

In Windows 7, the task director looks a bit different. Firstly, yous'll have to alter the view and so that it shows one graph per CPU. This is the just way to tell how many cores the CPU has in Windows seven using task manager.

Click on View, then CPU History and then One Graph Per CPU. At present you will be able to see how many logical processors you have.

Using task manager in Windows vii, you can see how many cores y'all have in total, but you can't tell how many processors y'all have and how many cores are on each processor.

Arrangement Information

Another simple style to become information about your CPU or CPUS without whatsoever software is to use the System Information dialog in Windows. Just click on start and type in arrangement data. By default, Organization Summary should be selected automatically.

On the right-hand side, you'll see a bunch of items listed that tell you about your PC. Yous should run into one or more lines pertaining to the processor listed. If you lot have more than than one CPU, information technology will list out each one on a separate line. And so now I tin tell my machine has two CPUs, each with ii cores.

My other PC as well has four cores, but merely with one processor. So I have one PC with a quad-core processor and another PC with two dual-core processors. Easy enough, correct?

Google & Third-Political party Tools

Once you have the verbal CPU model from organisation information, you also could just Google information technology and you lot'll get a spec sheet online for that processor (I Googled cadre i5-4660).

Y'all can also employ a costless third-party plan to get all kinds of detailed information about your processor. These programs can also tell you whether your CPU supports virtualization, vt-x, SSSE3, etc.

The ii virtually popular programs are Speccy and HWiNFO. Both of the programs work really well and give you simply well-nigh every detail you can imagine virtually your hardware.

So those are the quick and easy means to detect out how many cores y'all take in your PC. Note that if you practice plan on purchasing a machine that has more than than two physical processors, you'll demand to purchase Windows 10 Pro for Workstations, which hasn't come out nevertheless. However, it's rare for a consumer PC to need more than one CPU.

Windows x can support upwardly to a max of 32 cores for 32-bit Windows and 256 cores for 64-scrap Windows. None one is coming close to that limit any time shortly! Enjoy!