How to know how many cores your processor has: instructions for Windows 10

2022-10-20

As computer hardware evolves, the number of processor cores has steadily increased. This has long been synonymous with hardware performance: more cores means more tasks which can be processed in parallel. In addition, many resource-intensive programs and games are designed for a large number of logical threads in order to increase optimization.

There are several ways to find out the number of CPU cores. Let's look at the easiest and fastest ones, those which do not require special software installation.

Note. It is worth to separately note that the number of cores and the number of threads on the device are two different things, and quite a large part of modern devices have two or more threads per physical core.

Content :

Task Manager

This system utility is a treasure trove of data regarding the device status and technical characteristics. By invoking the Task Manager you can obtain all the necessary information to know how well your CPU is performing.

How to find out how many cores and threads your CPU has:

1. Call the Task Manager by hotkey pressing Ctrl + Alt + Delete or by opening the Search function;

   

2. Go to the "Performance" tab;

   

3. You will immediately see the "CPU". Under the Resource Usage graph you will see information about the speed, running time and more. Here you may also see a help about the number of threads which are otherwise called logical processors.

• The number of threads is displayed in the left column in front of "Threads".
• The number of cores is accessible through the right column in the row "Cores".

This method is very fast -it takes only a few mouse clicks to obtain all the relevant information on the CPU to see how many cores and how many threads it has.

Viewing CPU Data with "System Information"

Windows 10 has a built-in application to view the complete system information and may also obtain the CPU data here. This may be done in a couple of simple steps:

1. Open the "Run" window via a search or hotkey combination Win + R;
2. In this window created enter the command msinfo32;

   

3. Click on "OK" to open the "System Information" panel;
4. Find the line "CPU" at the right side of the screen. This will display the CPU manufacturer, number of physical cores and threads and processor frequency.

   

The "System Information" utility provides exclusively reliable information regarding all components of the computer.

Official website of the manufacturers

From the PC or notebook processor manufacturer it is easy to obtain the detailed specifications of the model at the main website of the CPU manufacturer.

For example for the manufacturer Intel the technical characteristics of the processor can be found:

1. Go to the Intel website.
2. In the Search field enter part of the processor name and press Enter.
3. In the search results you find your processor.
4. Click the link to access the technical specifications.
5. In the Performance section you find 2 lines: Number of threads and Number of cores.

   

If you have a device model from another manufacturer (e.g. AMD) simply enter its name in any search engine and go to the first query. This will take you to the manufacturer's official website and will contain detailed information about the performance.

Computer info in Device Manager (Windows 10)

Another utility to quickly learn all the basic characteristics of the installed CPU is Windows Device Manager.

The number of CPU cores in Windows 10 may be obtained as follows:

1. Locate the "This Computer" shortcut on the desktop or enter the name in the Search field;
2. Right-click the shortcut and select "Properties";

   

3. Open the Device Manager utility window also by opening the "Run" dialog and typing "devmgmtmsc";

   

4. The "System" window appears. On the left side of the screen select "Device Manager";
5. In the menu you will see the data related to all the computer components. Find the item "Processors" and open it. You will see the menu lines, the number of which is equal to the number of cores of the PC. You will immediately be able to read the name, manufacturer and frequency of each of them.

   

The "plus" of this method is that you can see the detailed data of each physical core of the device in real time. The disadvantage is that using this option you cannot know the number of processor threads.

Getting data through the console

If you prefer to use the command line interface of your computer (or the PowerShell console) you can get the desired processor information by typing just one command. It is not necessary to type it as administrator.

1. Execute the command line via the "Run" dialog by pressing Win + R on your keyboard.
2. In the window that appears enter the command "cmd".

   

3. In the console type "WMIC CPU Get DeviceID,NumberOfCores,NumberOfLogicalProcessors".

   

4. After a second delay a list of the PC processors is displayed and for each one the number of cores and logical processors.

CPUZ Software

Software often provides the user with much more possibilities than the built in applications. Windows 10 has a large number of utilities of its own but you can learn everything about your CPU with third party tools as well.

The CPU-Z utility provides extensive functionality that allows you to learn almost any processor information (including CPU count) in a couple of clicks.

1. Download the Utility at the following link on the official page.
2. After you have downloaded the CPU-Z distribution, just launch the application;
3. The "Cores" and "Threads" fields will show on the bottom right how many cores and threads are active respectively;

   

4. This program provides useful information such as CPU voltage and cache capacity.