This diagram is of an Intel Sandy Bridge microchip. As Kayvon explained yesterday, Sandy Bridge is a 2011 microarchitecture, which has since been superseded by 2012's Ivy Bridge (which in turn will be superseded by the upcoming Haswell microarchitecture). Even though some Sandy/Ivy Bridge chips (like the one above) only have 4 physical cores, many of them also utilize hyper-threading, which allows each core to run two threads simultaneously. This means that these kinds of chips will have an additional 4 logical cores, and are capable of running up to 8 threads simultaneously. It's pretty amazing too they're able to offer so much raw processing power while still offering pretty decent integrated graphics performance. Intel's also promising much improved processor graphics with Haswell.
This diagram is of an Intel Sandy Bridge microchip. As Kayvon explained yesterday, Sandy Bridge is a 2011 microarchitecture, which has since been superseded by 2012's Ivy Bridge (which in turn will be superseded by the upcoming Haswell microarchitecture). Even though some Sandy/Ivy Bridge chips (like the one above) only have 4 physical cores, many of them also utilize hyper-threading, which allows each core to run two threads simultaneously. This means that these kinds of chips will have an additional 4 logical cores, and are capable of running up to 8 threads simultaneously. It's pretty amazing too they're able to offer so much raw processing power while still offering pretty decent integrated graphics performance. Intel's also promising much improved processor graphics with Haswell.
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