How to Count CPU Core and Socket using the CLI

We can also discover some simple CPU count information through our first two tools. Each tool views the system differently so we need to be aware of what we are looking at. Dmidecode views the system from a socket perspective and cpuinfo views the system from a core perspective (which can be either an independent CPU or cores within a single CPU – AMD versus Intel ideology.)

dmidecode | grep "Central Processor" | wc -l
4

grep processor /proc/cpuinfo | wc -l
8

As you can see, it is important to know which view of the processor you are speaking about. This will become ever more important as CPUs continue to increase in cores per CPU, CPUs per socket and threads per core!