How many threads can be executed on an Intel Core 2 Duo processor simultaneously?

Answer 1

OK. How about an INTELLIGENT answer???? Would be nice, right? First, the difference between hardware and software threads. A hardware thread refers to a physical processor's ability to run a software thread. A software thread is part of your code that you execute in a thread. That is to say, if a processor can handle two hardware threads, that means the processor can simultaneously run up to two software threads at a time. Hardware threads means physical resources. Software threads are created by your program. Regardless of how many software threads your program defines, the processor that provides two hardware threads can only execute two of them concurrently. Now, I am having big problems finding out how many hardware threads a single processor can run. In graduate school, all of the processors we modeled provided two hardware threads. If this is always true, then the Core 2 Duo sounds like it provides 4 hardware threads. Your program can create pretty much any number of software threads, but at any given time there should be no more than 4 on the chip itself. I will see if I can ask someone from the university to get a good answer and will modify my answer if I find anything out. Either way, my answer completely trumps the one that was previously posted here.