How to Find the Number of Cores in Ubuntu

Linux administrators often need to know the number of cores while managing the Linux servers and assigning various tasks to multiple server machines. Initially, Computer systems come with single-core CPUs, but nowadays, we have multi-core CPUs to increase performance. This post will provide numerous methods and commands to find the number of cores in the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS system.

• Using the “lscpu” command
• Using the “/proc/cpuinfo” file
• Using the “nproc” command

Method 1: Finding the number of cores in Ubuntu using the “lscpu” command

The ‘lscpu’ command provides all the information related to the CPU Architecture.

The above command will show all the information related to the CPU, like CPU Architecture, the number of CPU cores, threads per core, etc.

To filter out the CPU information only, use the ‘lscpu’ command with the ‘egrep’ command like this:

As you can see in the screenshot attached above, the lines which contain the string “CPU” are shown as an output to the command mentioned above:

This ‘lscpu’ command collects all the information from the ‘/proc/cpuinfo’ file and sysfs, so this means we can directly get the CPU-related information from the ‘/proc/cpuinfo’ file.

Method 2: Finding the number of cores in Ubuntu using the “/proc/cpuinfo” file

As the name of ‘/proc/cpuinfo’ is saying, it is a file that contains the information of CPU, and we can easily view all the information of this file using the cat command:

From this whole bunch of information, we can filter out the information and get the exact number of cores by combining the cat, grep, and wc command as shown in the below-given command:

You can see, it has shown only the number of cores.

Method 3: Finding the number of cores in Ubuntu using the “nproc” command

Instead of using the ‘grep’ command to filter out the number of cores from the ‘/proc/cpuinfo’ file, there is a simple command known as ‘nproc’ for getting the number of cores only:

As you can witness in the output of the above command, it also has printed out the number of cores as we desired.

Conclusion

This post contains three easy yet profound methods to find the number of cores and other CPU-related information in the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Operating system. Using any of the above-given methods, finding the number of cores is no longer difficult.