Why do all the Windows Desktop Gadgets tell me my 4 core processor has 8 cores?

Question

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

Answer 1

Your processor has HyperThreading, giving it two virtual/logical cores per physical core.

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

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