Hi Candy, It would be in your "system information" section of your computer. To open System Information in Windows XP, click
Start, and then click
Help and Support. Click the Support button on the toolbar, and then, under
Tools and Links on the left side of the window, click
Advanced System Information. In the details pane, click
View detailed system information. Here's some info about computer processors:
A multi-core processor is a single computing component with two or more independent actual processors (called "cores"), which are the units that read and execute program instructions.[1] The instructions are ordinary cpu instructions like add, move data, and branch, but the multiple cores can run multiple instructions at the same time, increasing overall speed for programs amenable to parallel computing. Manufacturers typically integrate the cores onto a single integrated circuit die (known as a chip multiprocessor or CMP), or onto multiple dies in a single chip package.
Processors were originally developed with only one core. A many-core processor is a multi-core processor in which the number of cores is large enough that traditional multi-processor techniques are no longer efficient[citation needed] — largely because of issues with congestion in supplying instructions and data to the many processors. The many-core threshold is roughly in the range of several tens of cores; above this threshold network on chip technology is advantageous. Tilera processors feature a switch in each core to route data through an on-chip mesh network to lessen the data congestion, enabling their core count to scale up to 100 cores.
A dual-core processor has two cores (e.g. AMD Phenom II X2, Intel Core Duo), a quad-core processor contains four cores (e.g. AMD Phenom II X4, the Intel 2010 core line that includes three levels of quad-core processors, see i3, i5, and i7 at Intel Core), a hexa-core processor contains six cores (e.g. AMD Phenom II X6, Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition 980X), an octa-core processor containes eight cores (e.g. AMD FX-8150). A multi-core processor implements multiprocessing in a single physical package. Designers may couple cores in a multi-core device tightly or loosely. For example, cores may or may not share caches, and they may implement message passing or shared memory inter-core communication methods. Common network topologies to interconnect cores include bus, ring, two-dimensional mesh, and crossbar. Homogeneous multi-core systems include only identical cores, heterogeneous multi-core systems have cores which are not identical. Just as with single-processor systems, cores in multi-core systems may implement architectures such as superscalar, VLIW, vector processing, SIMD, or multithreading.
Multi-core processors are widely used across many application domains including general-purpose, embedded, network, digital signal processing (DSP), and graphics.
The improvement in performance gained by the use of a multi-core processor depends very much on the software algorithms used and their implementation. In particular, possible gains are limited by the fraction of the software that can be parallelized to run on multiple cores simultaneously; this effect is described by Amdahl's law. In the best case, so-called embarrassingly parallel problems may realize speedup factors near the number of cores, or even more if the problem is split up enough to fit within each core's cache(s), avoiding use of much slower main system memory. Most applications, however, are not accelerated so much unless programmers invest a prohibitive amount of effort in re-factoring the whole problem[2]. The parallelization of software is a significant ongoing topic of research.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-core_processor
Windows XP
