How to identify CPU processor architecture on Linux

Last updated on October 30, 2020 by Dan Nanni

Multi-core processor architecture becomes increasingly popular nowadays. This trend is accelerated by the need for supporting high-performance computing applications, hardware virtualization, and server consolidation in data centers. If you are a server administrator and a cloud architect, you must be full aware of the CPU processor architecture of your servers so that deployed applications can take full advantage of underlying hardware capability.

The trend of high core density hardware also guides the evolution of software development, introducing new types of parallel programming models. Multi-threaded applications developed under these models must be able to leverage parallel execution across different cores, multi-level cache, CPU/memory affinity, etc.

This tutorial describes how to identify CPU processor architecture from the command line on Linux. A CPU processor architecture is characterized by the number of physical sockets/processors, the number of cores per processor, multi-level (L1/L2/L3) cache, NUMA (Non-uniform memory access) configuration, etc.

Method One: `likwid`

likwid ((Like I Knew What I'm Doing) is a suite of command line tools that are designed to support application designers for multi-threaded application development. likwid works with Linux kernel 2.6 and higher, and is regularly updated to support the latest generations of Intel/AMD processors, such as Intel's Sandy, Ivy, Haswell, Broadwell, Skylake processors, and AMD K8, K10, and Bulldozer (Interlagos).

Install `likwid` on Linux

$ tar xvfvz likwid-3.0.0.tar.gz
$ cd likwid-3.0.0
$ sudo make install

likwid comes with several command-line tools:

likwid-topology: Display the NUMA and cache topology.
likwid-perfctr: Display the hardware performance counters of processors.
likwid-features: Display and change hardware prefetch control bits on Intel Core 2 processors.
likwid-pin: Pin a multi-threaded application to a specific CPU.
likwid-bench: Benchmarking tool for rapid prototyping of threaded assembly kernels.
likwid-mpirun: Script enabling CPU pinning of MPI and MPI/threaded hybrid applications.
likwid-perfscope: Frontend for likwid-perfctr which allows real-time plotting of performance metrics.
likwid-powermeter: Tool for accessing RAPL counters and query Turbo mode steps on Intel processor.
likwid-memsweeper: Tool to clean up ccNUMA (cache-coherent NUMA) memory domains.

To visualize the CPU processor architecture:

$ likwid-topology -g

-------------------------------------------------------------
CPU type:    Intel Core Westmere processor
*************************************************************
Hardware Thread Topology
*************************************************************
Sockets:    2
Cores per socket:    4
Threads per core:    2
-------------------------------------------------------------
HWThread    Thread        Core        Socket
0        0        0        0
1        0        0        1
2        0        10        0
3        0        10        1
4        0        1        0
5        0        1        1
6        0        9        0
7        0        9        1
8        1        0        0
9        1        0        1
10        1        10        0
11        1        10        1
12        1        1        0
13        1        1        1
14        1        9        0
15        1        9        1
-------------------------------------------------------------
Socket 0: ( 0 8 4 12 6 14 2 10 )
Socket 1: ( 1 9 5 13 7 15 3 11 )
-------------------------------------------------------------

*************************************************************
Cache Topology
*************************************************************
Level:    1
Size:    32 kB
Cache groups:    ( 0 8 ) ( 4 12 ) ( 6 14 ) ( 2 10 ) ( 1 9 ) ( 5 13 ) ( 7 15 ) ( 3 11 )
-------------------------------------------------------------
Level:    2
Size:    256 kB
Cache groups:    ( 0 8 ) ( 4 12 ) ( 6 14 ) ( 2 10 ) ( 1 9 ) ( 5 13 ) ( 7 15 ) ( 3 11 )
-------------------------------------------------------------
Level:    3
Size:    12 MB
Cache groups:    ( 0 8 4 12 6 14 2 10 ) ( 1 9 5 13 7 15 3 11 )
-------------------------------------------------------------

*************************************************************
NUMA Topology
*************************************************************
NUMA domains: 2
-------------------------------------------------------------
Domain 0:
Processors:  0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14
Relative distance to nodes:  10 20
Memory: 4207.48 MB free of total 8181.75 MB
-------------------------------------------------------------
Domain 1:
Processors:  1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15
Relative distance to nodes:  20 10
Memory: 4020.77 MB free of total 8192 MB
-------------------------------------------------------------

*************************************************************
Graphical:
*************************************************************
Socket 0:
+-----------------------------------------+
| +-------+ +-------+ +-------+ +-------+ |
| |  0  8 | | 4  12 | | 6  14 | | 2  10 | |
| +-------+ +-------+ +-------+ +-------+ |
| +-------+ +-------+ +-------+ +-------+ |
| |  32kB | |  32kB | |  32kB | |  32kB | |
| +-------+ +-------+ +-------+ +-------+ |
| +-------+ +-------+ +-------+ +-------+ |
| | 256kB | | 256kB | | 256kB | | 256kB | |
| +-------+ +-------+ +-------+ +-------+ |
| +-------------------------------------+ |
| |                 12MB                | |
| +-------------------------------------+ |
+-----------------------------------------+
Socket 1:
+-----------------------------------------+
| +-------+ +-------+ +-------+ +-------+ |
| |  1  9 | | 5  13 | | 7  15 | | 3  11 | |
| +-------+ +-------+ +-------+ +-------+ |
| +-------+ +-------+ +-------+ +-------+ |
| |  32kB | |  32kB | |  32kB | |  32kB | |
| +-------+ +-------+ +-------+ +-------+ |
| +-------+ +-------+ +-------+ +-------+ |
| | 256kB | | 256kB | | 256kB | | 256kB | |
| +-------+ +-------+ +-------+ +-------+ |
| +-------------------------------------+ |
| |                 12MB                | |
| +-------------------------------------+ |
+-----------------------------------------+

The above is an example output of HP ProLiant DL380 G7, where it shows two physical sockets, Hyper-Threading enabled quad-core CPU in each socket, 32kB L1 cache, 256kB L2 cache, and 12MB L3 cache.

Method Two: `hwloc`

hwloc is a command-line suite that gathers various attributes of the underlying processor architecture, such as NUMA memory nodes, multi-level caches, processor sockets, processor cores, PCI devices/bridges, etc.

Install `hwloc` on Debian, Ubuntu or Linux Mint

$ sudo apt-get install hwloc

Install `hwloc` on Fedora, CentOS or RHEL

$ sudo yum install hwloc

Once hwloc package is installed, you can use lstopo to show processor architecture as follows.

$ lstopo --no-io

If you are running lstopo in Linux desktop environment, it will pop up a window which visualizes the underlying processor architecture and cache hierarchy nicely as follows.

If lstopo is called in a desktop-less server environment, it will show the output in text format as follows.

Machine (16GB)
  NUMANode L#0 (P#0 8182MB) + Socket L#0 + L3 L#0 (12MB)
    L2 L#0 (256KB) + L1 L#0 (32KB) + Core L#0
      PU L#0 (P#0)
      PU L#1 (P#8)
    L2 L#1 (256KB) + L1 L#1 (32KB) + Core L#1
      PU L#2 (P#2)
      PU L#3 (P#10)
    L2 L#2 (256KB) + L1 L#2 (32KB) + Core L#2
      PU L#4 (P#4)
      PU L#5 (P#12)
    L2 L#3 (256KB) + L1 L#3 (32KB) + Core L#3
      PU L#6 (P#6)
      PU L#7 (P#14)
  NUMANode L#1 (P#1 8192MB) + Socket L#1 + L3 L#1 (12MB)
    L2 L#4 (256KB) + L1 L#4 (32KB) + Core L#4
      PU L#8 (P#1)
      PU L#9 (P#9)
    L2 L#5 (256KB) + L1 L#5 (32KB) + Core L#5
      PU L#10 (P#3)
      PU L#11 (P#11)
    L2 L#6 (256KB) + L1 L#6 (32KB) + Core L#6
      PU L#12 (P#5)
      PU L#13 (P#13)
    L2 L#7 (256KB) + L1 L#7 (32KB) + Core L#7
      PU L#14 (P#7)
      PU L#15 (P#15)

You can let lstopo export processor architecture visualization to a separate image file by specifying an output file as follows.

$ lstopo --no-io topo.png

Method Three: `numactl`

numactl is a command line tool for tuning NUMA hardware (such as pinning processes or threads to specific physical cores or ccNUMA nodes).

Install `numactl` on Debian, Ubuntu or Linux Mint

$ sudo apt-get install numactl

Install `numactl` on Fedora, CentOS or RHEL

$ sudo yum install numactl

If you want to check available NUMA nodes with numactl, do the following:

$ numactl --hardware

available: 2 nodes (0-1)
node 0 cpus: 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14
node 0 size: 8181 MB
node 0 free: 4235 MB
node 1 cpus: 1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15
node 1 size: 8191 MB
node 1 free: 4048 MB
node distances:
node   0   1
  0:  10  20
  1:  20  10

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How to identify CPU processor architecture on Linux

Method One: likwid

Install likwid on Linux

Method Two: hwloc

Install hwloc on Debian, Ubuntu or Linux Mint

Install hwloc on Fedora, CentOS or RHEL

Method Three: numactl

Install numactl on Debian, Ubuntu or Linux Mint

Install numactl on Fedora, CentOS or RHEL