How to Detect the Number of Physical Processors / Cores on Windows, Mac and Linux

I have a multi threaded c++ application that runs on Windows, Mac and a few Linux flavors.

To make a long story short: In order for it to run at maximum efficiency, I have to be able to instantiate a single thread per physical processor/core. Creating more threads than there are physical processors/cores degrades the performance of my program considerably. I can already correctly detect the number of logical processors/cores correctly on all three of these platforms. To be able to detect the number of physical processors/cores correctly I'll have to detect if hyper-treading is supported AND active.

My question therefore is if there is a way to detect whether Hyper Threading is supported and enabled? If so, how exactly.

EDIT: This is no longer 100% correct due to Intel's ongoing befuddlement.

The way I understand the question is that you are asking how to detect the number of CPU cores vs. CPU threads which is different from detecting the number of logical and physical cores in a system. CPU cores are often not considered physical cores by the OS unless they have their own package or die. So an OS will report that a Core 2 Duo, for example, has 1 physical and 2 logical CPUs and an Intel P4 with hyper-threads will be reported exactly the same way even though 2 hyper-threads vs. 2 CPU cores is a very different thing performance wise.

I struggled with this until I pieced together the solution below, which I believe works for both AMD and Intel processors. As far as I know, and I could be wrong, AMD does not yet have CPU threads but they have provided a way to detect them that I assume will work on future AMD processors which may have CPU threads.

In short here are the steps using the CPUID instruction:

Detect CPU vendor using CPUID function 0
Check for HTT bit 28 in CPU features EDX from CPUID function 1
Get the logical core count from EBX[23:16] from CPUID function 1
Get actual non-threaded CPU core count
1. If vendor == 'GenuineIntel' this is 1 plus EAX[31:26] from CPUID function 4
2. If vendor == 'AuthenticAMD' this is 1 plus ECX[7:0] from CPUID function 0x80000008

Sounds difficult but here is a, hopefully, platform independent C++ program that does the trick:

#include <iostream>
#include <string>

using namespace std;


void cpuID(unsigned i, unsigned regs[4]) {
#ifdef _WIN32
  __cpuid((int *)regs, (int)i);

#else
  asm volatile
    ("cpuid" : "=a" (regs[0]), "=b" (regs[1]), "=c" (regs[2]), "=d" (regs[3])
     : "a" (i), "c" (0));
  // ECX is set to zero for CPUID function 4
#endif
}


int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
  unsigned regs[4];

  // Get vendor
  char vendor[12];
  cpuID(0, regs);
  ((unsigned *)vendor)[0] = regs[1]; // EBX
  ((unsigned *)vendor)[1] = regs[3]; // EDX
  ((unsigned *)vendor)[2] = regs[2]; // ECX
  string cpuVendor = string(vendor, 12);

  // Get CPU features
  cpuID(1, regs);
  unsigned cpuFeatures = regs[3]; // EDX

  // Logical core count per CPU
  cpuID(1, regs);
  unsigned logical = (regs[1] >> 16) & 0xff; // EBX[23:16]
  cout << " logical cpus: " << logical << endl;
  unsigned cores = logical;

  if (cpuVendor == "GenuineIntel") {
    // Get DCP cache info
    cpuID(4, regs);
    cores = ((regs[0] >> 26) & 0x3f) + 1; // EAX[31:26] + 1

  } else if (cpuVendor == "AuthenticAMD") {
    // Get NC: Number of CPU cores - 1
    cpuID(0x80000008, regs);
    cores = ((unsigned)(regs[2] & 0xff)) + 1; // ECX[7:0] + 1
  }

  cout << "    cpu cores: " << cores << endl;

  // Detect hyper-threads  
  bool hyperThreads = cpuFeatures & (1 << 28) && cores < logical;

  cout << "hyper-threads: " << (hyperThreads ? "true" : "false") << endl;

  return 0;
}

I haven't actually tested this on Windows or OSX yet but it should work as the CPUID instruction is valid on i686 machines. Obviously, this wont work for PowerPC but then they don't have hyper-threads either.

Here is the output on a few different Intel machines:

Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.20GHz:

 logical cpus: 2
    cpu cores: 2
hyper-threads: false

Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q8400 @ 2.66GHz:

 logical cpus: 4
    cpu cores: 4
hyper-threads: false

Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5520 @ 2.27GHz (w/ x2 physical CPU packages):

 logical cpus: 16
    cpu cores: 8
hyper-threads: true

Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz:

 logical cpus: 2
    cpu cores: 1
hyper-threads: true

Note this, does not give the number of physically cores as intended, but logical cores.

If you can use C++11 (thanks to alfC's comment beneath):

#include <iostream>
#include <thread>

int main() {
    std::cout << std::thread::hardware_concurrency() << std::endl;
    return 0;
}

Otherwise maybe the Boost library is an option for you. Same code but different include as above. Include <boost/thread.hpp> instead of <thread>.

Windows only solution desribed here:

GetLogicalProcessorInformation

for linux, /proc/cpuinfo file. I am not running linux now so can't give you more detail. You can count physical/logical processor instances. If logical count is twice as physical, then you have HT enabled (true only for x86).

The current highest voted answer using CPUID appears to be obsolete. It reports both the wrong number of logical and physical processors. This appears to be confirmed from this answer cpuid-on-intel-i7-processors.

Specifically, using CPUID.1.EBX[23:16] to get the logical processors or CPUID.4.EAX[31:26]+1 to get the physical ones with Intel processors does not give the correct result on any Intel processor I have.

For Intel CPUID.Bh should be used Intel_thread/Fcore and cache topology. The solution does not appear to be trivial. For AMD a different solution is necessary.

Here is source code by by Intel which reports the correct number of physical and logical cores as well as the correct number of sockets https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-64-architecture-processor-topology-enumeration/. I tested this on a 80 logical core, 40 physical core, 4 socket Intel system.

Here is source code for AMD http://developer.amd.com/resources/documentation-articles/articles-whitepapers/processor-and-core-enumeration-using-cpuid/. It gave the correct result on my single socket Intel system but not on my four socket system. I don't have a AMD system to test.

I have not dissected the source code yet to find a simple answer (if one exists) with CPUID. It seems that if the solution can change (as it seems to have) that the best solution is to use a library or OS call.

Edit:

Here is a solution for Intel processors with CPUID leaf 11 (Bh). The way to do this is loop over the logical processors and get the x2APIC ID for each logical processor from CPUID and count the number of x2APIC IDs were the least significant bit is zero. For systems without hyper-threading the x2APIC ID will always be even. For systems with hyper-threading each x2APIC ID will have an even and odd version.

// input:  eax = functionnumber, ecx = 0
// output: eax = output[0], ebx = output[1], ecx = output[2], edx = output[3]
//static inline void cpuid (int output[4], int functionnumber)  

int getNumCores(void) {
    //Assuming an Intel processor with CPUID leaf 11
    int cores = 0;
    #pragma omp parallel reduction(+:cores)
    {
        int regs[4];
        cpuid(regs,11);
        if(!(regs[3]&1)) cores++; 
    }
    return cores;
}

The threads must be bound for this to work. OpenMP by default does not bind threads. Setting export OMP_PROC_BIND=true will bind them or they can be bound in code as shown at thread-affinity-with-windows-msvc-and-openmp.

I tested this on my 4 core/8 HT system and it returned 4 with and without hyper-threading disabled in the BIOS. I also tested in on a 4 socket system with each socket having 10 cores / 20 HT and it returned 40 cores.

AMD processors or older Intel processors without CPUID leaf 11 have to do something different.

How to Detect the Number of Physical Processors / Cores on Windows, Mac and Linux

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