FOSSwire

A nice, easy and quick Linux trick for you today and that's how to get some technical information about your CPU. The Linux kernel obviously knows all sorts of things about your hardware while it's running and quite a bit of this information is made available to the end user.

There's actually a virtual filesystem (it doesn't exist on your disk, it's created when your computer boots up and updated constantly) called proc which the Linux kernel populates with hardware and runtime information.

The file which shows you CPU-related stuff is called cpuinfo. All you need to do is open up the /proc/cpuinfo file to see the data. You can do this using your favourite text editor, just open up /proc/cpuinfo, or you can use the terminal:

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 15
model : 4
model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz
stepping : 1
cpu MHz : 3000.420
cache size : 1024 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 2
core id : 0
cpu cores : 1
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 5
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl cid xtpr
bogomips : 6004.30
clflush size : 64

processor : 1
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 15
model : 4
model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz
stepping : 1
cpu MHz : 3000.420
cache size : 1024 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 2
core id : 0
cpu cores : 1
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 5
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl cid xtpr
bogomips : 6000.73
clflush size : 64

That's the result from my Pentium 4 desktop, and here's the result from my server (a 2600+ Sempron):

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 15
model : 44
model name : AMD Sempron(tm) Processor 2600+
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 1599.629
cache size : 128 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 1
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt lm 3dnowext 3dnow up pni lahf_lm ts ttp tm stc
bogomips : 3199.83

And if you're wondering why the P4's output is so much longer, it's because of hyperthreading which creates two virtual processors (it's not, unfortunately, a dual core system however).