What are the differences between a thread and a core in a CPU?
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Cores are the workers doing things on the CPU. Each worker can do one thing at a time (for example add two numbers).
A thread is like a task. A worker can work on that task which consists of multiple operations, one after the other. A thread can also split into more threads (follow up tasks, sub tasks). Such a thread can, but doesn’t always have to be worked on. In a single core, you would classically have one thread running “at a time”. Scheduling etc happens, threads can share resources between cores depending on architecture.
But, one worker can work on one task, then another, then back to the first and then back an forth between them. At first glance this seems just as fast as running one after the other. But, if the rest around it is setup for it, it can improve the speed of both (say they would have a wait time for data to arrive). So instead of waiting for his colleague to lbring him parts for his task, the worker works on another one for a moment. So while a 4 Core CPU doing 8 threads isn’t necessarily faster, it can be. Intel calls their version of this hyperthreading. Not sure AMD has a version?
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