11-24-2010, 02:50 PM

How many cores does the i3 have? (the one in the base model of the iMac)??

I'm asking because when I open activity monito, right click on its application icon and choose CPU usage as the dock icon it has 4 bars (representing 4 cores)…I thought the i3 only had 2 cores…

11-24-2010, 03:23 PM

i3 has 2 cores each capable of running 2 threads.

I'm not an expert, but maybe that's where the 4 bars are coming from.

Cheers ... McBie

11-24-2010, 03:31 PM

The i3 is the successor to the Core2Duo and thus has two cores.

I have the 27" i7 iMac and when I ask for the CPU Usage monitor, I get 8 bars which makes since I have 4 cores and 4 more with hyper-threading..

So the 4 bars doesn't make sense on the i3..even on the i5 it should only show 4 bars since that one is a quad-core which lacks hyper-threading..

Regards

11-24-2010, 04:01 PM

Originally Posted by shahvikram123

How many cores does the i3 have? (the one in the base model of the iMac)??

I'm asking because when I open activity monito, right click on its application icon and choose CPU usage as the dock icon it has 4 bars (representing 4 cores)…I thought the i3 only had 2 cores…

Originally Posted by McBie

i3 has 2 cores each capable of running 2 threads.

I'm not an expert, but maybe that's where the 4 bars are coming from.

Cheers ... McBie

Originally Posted by Raz0rEdge

The i3 is the successor to the Core2Duo and thus has two cores.

I have the 27" i7 iMac and when I ask for the CPU Usage monitor, I get 8 bars which makes since I have 4 cores and 4 more with hyper-threading..

So the 4 bars doesn't make sense on the i3..even on the i5 it should only show 4 bars since that one is a quad-core which lacks hyper-threading..

Regards

All the iX series of processors support hyper threading, not just the i7's.

So a dual core i3/i5 processor has the ability to hyper thread into 4 threads. Your 4 bars is just showing the 4 threads possible because of hyper threading.