Multithreading - are the multi-core processors really doing parallel processing?

Posted by so.very.tired on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by so.very.tired
Published on 2014-06-03T21:21:29Z Indexed on 2014/06/03 21:24 UTC
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multithreading

Are the modern multi-core processors really doing parallel processing?
Like, take for example, Intel's core i7 processors. some of them has #of Cores: 4 and #of Threads: 8 (taken from Intel's specifications pages). If I to write a program (say in Java or C) that has multiple threads of execution, will they really be processed concurrently? My instructor said that "it is not always the case with multi-core processors", but didn't gave to much details.

And why do Intel have to specify both #of Cores and #of Threads? Isn't thread just a term that describe a program-related abstraction, unlike "cores" which are actual hardware? ("Every thread runs on different core").

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