What Is a CPU Core?
In layman terms, a core is a CPU’s processor. It carries out the instructions or commands received from the user.One core is only capable of carrying out one task at a time, so the more number of cores a CPU possesses, the more number of tasks it can carry out simultaneously thus making the CPU more efficient.
When CPU’s were first invented in 1971, they only had a single core which, to be fair, at that time was enough as computers usually had to carry out a single instruction at a time, in addition, there werent many softwares that the computer had to launch and run. However as computer users started to need and run several softwares at once, it led to the need for more cores and thus paved the road for multi-core processors, which we see today.
Most processors, specifically the ones found in laptops, usually contain two cores (like the Intel Core Duo), however processors like Intel’s 8th gen processors have four cores, making them more efficient than two core processors. Nowadays, CPU’s can have 2 to 18 cores, each one capable of working on a different task.
Processors make use of Multithreading or Hyper-threading to break or divide a single physical core into two virtual cores, each of which is called a thread. A CPU can have a total of two threads per core. For example a quad (4) core CPU will have 8 threads, while an octa (8) core CPU will have 16 threads so on and so forth.
Processor intensive softwares, such as video or picture editing softwares, tend to benefit from more cores as more cores equal to more threads, thus making the softwares faster and more smoothly. This isn’t the case with lightly threaded apps (which include AA games and most AAA games), which gain no benefit from more number of cores.