My Quad Core AMD FX 4170 shows only 2 cores

[TaqWilla]

How can I fix my problem? I've got a AMD FX Quad_Core Processor at 4.2 Ghz, 16 Gb. 1600 Mhz RAM a 120 Gb SSD Drive with an additional 1 Tb internal HD and an ASUS Radeon HD 7770 GPU. How do I get everything to read 4 cores instead of 2 cores? I tried the msconfig deal but that didn't work, so Is there anything else I can try?

 

[Textfield]

How can I fix my problem? I've got a AMD FX Quad_Core Processor at 4.2 Ghz, 16 Gb. 1600 Mhz RAM a 120 Gb SSD Drive with an additional 1 Tb internal HD and an ASUS Radeon HD 7770 GPU. How do I get everything to read 4 cores instead of 2 cores? I tried the msconfig deal but that didn't work, so Is there anything else I can try?

As I understand, Windows (and perhaps some other apps) see these FX CPUs as 2 core 4 thread CPUs. That's because they're not truly quad-core.

Basically, Intel creates their "logical cores," or effective cores, by assigning two execution threads to every core, a technique intel trademarked as Hyperthreading. Intel always cites physical core numbers, not thread numbers, so a quad-core i7 has 8 threads, and behaves like an eight-core CPU.

AMD, on the other hand, creates their "logical cores" in the form of modules. Each module holds two execution pipelines and two integer pipelines (and thus two threads) but only one floating point pipeline. Your CPU has 2 modules for four threads, and since you have four concurrent execution and integer pipelines, two to each module, AMD calls it a quad-core, but the architecture (and performance) are really more similar to a multithreaded dual-core CPU, and so many applications see it as such.

 

[TaqWilla]

Thanks for your help.