How does a “core” and “thread” in a processor work? What is their difference?
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This here is a 4 core CPU [https://www.techspot.com/articles-info/2363/images/2021-12-19-image-6-j_1100.webp](https://www.techspot.com/articles-info/2363/images/2021-12-19-image-6-j_1100.webp)
Core is the physical bit of hardware that does the computing.
Thread is a logical execution of a program. A program is a series of machine commands which need to be excecated to run a program.
A simple CPU only has one core, which can only run one thread at a time.
As CPUs developed it became apparent that a lot of the time that single thread is waiting on a memory operation and CPU time is wasted. To optimize that and better use the CPU resources multithreading was developed so that a CPU runs more than one thread at a time. It still only does one operation at a time, but one operation from one thread, then one operation from the second thread etc, it flips between threads. That results in both memory resources and CPU resources being used more on average because it’s usually the case that the different threads need to wait on memory at different times.
Development to multicore processors was simply to put more CPUs in your CPU, just copy paste the processing hardware. Its simpler to just have two processors than it is to make a single processor twice as fast.
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