CPU Architecture fundamental
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Last updated
Processor: the physical chip that plugs into a socket on the system or processor board and contains one or more CPUs implemented as cores or hardware threads.
Core: an independent CPU instance on a multicore processor. The use of cores is a way to scale processors, called chip-level multiprocessing (CMP).
Hardware thread: a CPU architecture that supports executing multiple threads in parallel on a single core (including Intel’s Hyper-Threading Technology), where each thread is an independent CPU instance. One name for this scaling approach is multithreading.
CPU instruction: a single CPU operation, from its instruction set. There are instructions for arithmetic operations, memory I/O, and control logic.
Logical CPU: also called a virtual processor (vCPU), an operating system CPU instance (a schedulable CPU entity). This may be implemented by the processor as a hardware thread (in which case it may also be called a virtual core), a core, or a single-core processor.
Scheduler: the kernel subsystem that assigns threads to run on CPUs.
Run queue: a queue of runnable threads that are waiting to be serviced by CPUs. For Solaris, it is often called a dispatcher queue.
Intel® Core™ Processor on Macbook pro: 2 cores, 4 threads
Chapter 6: CPUs in