When we try to know a computer’s architecture and performance at CPU level using Linux commands like nproc or lscpu, we often find out that we are not able to properly interpret their results because we confuse terms such as physical CPU, logical CPU, virtual CPU, core, thread, socket, etc. If we add concepts like HyperThreading (not to be confused with multithreading), we are in a situation where we can not be sure how many cores our box has, we don’t understand why commands like htop indicate that we have 8 cpus when we thought we had bought a single quad-core processor, etc. In short, it’s a mess.
Differences between physical CPU vs logical CPU vs Core vs Thread vs Socket
