Suppose a system has 4 Intel Xeon processors
each having 10 physical cores
with HyperThreading enabled which makes a total of 80 cores
Now it is completely confusing when in documentation they start to use these terminologies differently everywhere.
Now the question is that am i right here ?
Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Enterprise x64 Edition supports 8 processors [Link]
And then it is also written
x64-based versions of Windows Server 2003 that are running on a computer that uses a multicore processor or a hyper-threading processor support a maximum number of 64 logical processors.
This means that that Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Enterprise x64 support only 8 logical cores since they used the word processor twice with different context ?
As far as i can remember CPU is equivalent to core, and processors are the hardware that bundle up CPUs and attach them onto one socket.
In short, for the top most description, the system has 8 processors, 40 physical CPUs(cores) in total and 80 Logical CPUs(cores) ?
Best Answer
Actually, no. A dual core processor is one processor with 2 cores, a quad core is one processor with 4 cores.. and so on.Hyperthreading dosen't come onto play yet
Lets take a 8 core processor, and have them on a hypothetical 8 processor SMP system. You have 8 processors with 64 physical cores . Hyperthreading lets you run 128 logical cores on them. Likewise the same setup with quadcores would have 8 processors with 32 physical cores, and with hyperthreading run up to 64 logical cores (which is the maximum in the windows server enterprise would be able to run).
Apparently in this case, a logical core is equivalent to the ability to run a thread.
EDIT: cleaned up the answer. Apparently i misunderstood it - the hyperthreading article on wikipedia was really useful here