by: Paul Horowitz
Knowing the number of CPU cores a particular Mac has can be useful for performance optimization, stress testing, compatibility, and to otherwise make informed decisions about system performance on a Mac. For example, maybe you want to make sure you have multiple cores available to run a virtual machine, or you want to spawn a number of processes that is equivalent to the number of cores on a Mac for a stress test.
We’ll show you several ways to determine how many CPU cores a Mac computer has, including finding this information from the GUI, and from the command line, and breaking down the CPU core count for performance cores versus efficiency cores on Apple Silicon hardware.