APU A8 5500 Does it have 4 physical cores?

[zingy12]

My computer currently has an APU A8 5500, however, when looking through the task manager, I saw it only has 2 physical cores, and 4 logical processors. I always thought that the A8 was a true quad core, and I was just wondering if I was mistaken or not.

Thanks!

 

[ingtar33]

its a quad core

in the bulldozer archetecture, amd merged 2 cores into one core module... the 2 cores share some resources, mostly they share cache and 1 floating point processor... it's 2 cores by every metric except windows. Windows for some reason sees each core module as a single core rather then a 2 core unit.

yes it's a quad core cpu.

 

[ewok93]

What he means to ask is if it's 4 physical cores or 2 cores and 4 threads. It is the latter. It is a quad core CPU, though it only has two physical cores.

 

[ingtar33]

What he means to ask is if it's 4 physical cores or 2 cores and 4 threads. It is the latter. It is a quad core CPU, though it only has two physical cores.

it has 4 integer cores so it is a quad core cpu. it has 2 core modules. it has 4 separate integer cores, and by every definition of a cpu core since the beginning of time, an integer core is a cpu core. It wasn't until the addition of floating point processing onto the cpu sometime around 2000 that we added floating point units to cpu cores... since cpus generally suck at floating point math (yes, even intel cpus suck at it) many programs borrow your gpu these days for this type of math (gpus are giant floating point calculators), the sharing of a floating point unit between the two seperate integer cores forming the core module doesn't change the fact it's a quad core cpu.

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

My speculation as to why Windows is treating your processor as 2 physical and 4 logical is for the purposes of thread dispatch to each core. When possible, it is more practical to dispatch threads to each module first, then to the separate cores on those modules, as there is less contention for shared resources. By treating the Bulldozer style modules as you would Intel's Hyperthreading, you can eek out a slight bit more performance.