Adding more cores to a single processor offers significant benefits due to the multitasking nature of modern operating systems. For some purposes, however, there is a practical upper limit to the number of cores that will yield improvements relative to the cost of adding them.
Does More Cores Mean Better Performance? | CPU Cores and Threads Explained
Multi-core processors have been available in personal computers since the early 2000s. Multi-core designs addressed the problem of processors reaching the limit of their physical limitations in terms of their clock speeds and how effectively they could be cooled while remaining accurate. By moving to extra cores on a single processor chip, manufacturers avoided clock speed issues by effectively multiplying the amount of data that could be processed by the CPU.
When they were originally released, manufacturers offered only two cores in a single CPU, but now there are options for four, six, and even 10 or more. In addition to adding cores, simultaneous multithreading technologies like Intel's Hyper-Threading can double the number of virtual cores the operating system sees.
A process is a specific task, such as a program, that runs on a computer. A process consists of one or more threads.
