What Exactly are Cores and Threads in CPU?

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As an Electrical Engineering major, I have taking several introductory computer engineering courses. I have studied ARMv8 for a long time now. I know about registers, instruction fetch, arithmetic instructions, branching instructions, pipelining, and data forwarding. I know that some of these are specific to ARM only. ARMv8 is the only architecture that I know.

However, I am curious to know what exactly are cores and threads? And specifically for cores, how are instructions distributed to each core? And if a dependency exists from one core to another core’s instructions, is there a such thing as data forwarding from one core to another?

Lastly, kinda unrelated, but what is a Graphics Card and what are the differences between GPU architecture and the ARMv8 architecture that I have studied?

If someone could please answer these three questions, I would greatly be appreciated.

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