Why do all the Windows 7 Desktop Gadgets tell me my 4 core processor has 8 cores? I have an Intel i7 870 with 4 cores. Yet every gadget I try tells me I have 8. Whats up?
Thanks
Sounds like your processor is hyper threaded which means each core will have two threads, Windows will see these threads (logical cores) as additional cores.
This is most probably because the i7 870 has hyperthreading (~2 hardware threads by core), my Core i5 760 shows only 4. For each processor core that is physically present, the operating system addresses two virtual processors
Looks like the applications are detecting what is called Hyperthreading. This feature effectively allows a single core to behave as two cores. See the wikipedia article if you want to know more. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading