MacOS – Why does Apple Activity Monitor report that the Mac with a dual-core Intel i5 Ivy Bridge CPU has 4 cores

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I just got a new Apple MacBook Pro 13", mid-2012, which has a dual-core Intel i5 Ivy Bridge CPU. When I run Activity Monitor and turn on the Floating CPU Window, it shows a 4-bar graph (indicating 4 cores).

On my older MacBook Pro with an Intel Core 2 Duo dual-core processor, Activity Monitor only showed a 2-bar graph (indicating 2 cores).

Why does Activity Monitor seem to indicate that my Mac has 4 cores, when clearly it does not?

Best Answer

This is a technology called Hyperthreading those i5 chips support.

It means two threads can run simultaneously on each core resulting in two additional virtual cores. OS X's Activity Monitor only shows virtual cores, not physical cores. Likewise, a quad-core chip has eight virtual cores and that's what's presented in Activity Monitor.

To sum it up:

  • 1 CPU
  • 2 physical cores
  • 4 virtual cores (2 per physical core)
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