how to find detailed information about your cpu in linux

Many times you want to find out more information about the hardware, especially the CPU that is installed on your machine. This cpu info is most often helpful if you want to download or install an appropriate version of a software, for example.

There are a couple of options available for you to find the information regarding CPUs on your Linux system. The two most commonly used is the cpuinfo virtual system file and the lscpu command. Either of them will provide you with detailed information about your CPU architecture….

You should able to find information about the following (and much more) in the output

  • Number of CPUs : The total number of processors that you have in the system.
  • CPU Vendor : The vendor id of each of the processors that you have installed. This shows you the vendor id such as GenuineIntel or AuthenticAMD.
  • CPU Architecture : The architecture of the processors. The architecture is anything like i686, i585, i386 etc.
  • CPU model name : The model name of the CPU. This provides a more descriptive name of your CPU such as Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E6850.
  • CPU Speed : The clock speed or the frequency of the processor.
  • CPU Cache Size : The size of the cache.
  • Number of Cores : The number of cores in your processor.
  • Byte Order : The byte order of the CPU.

There are several other advanced information and values you will find in the output as well.

lscpu command on linux


cpuinfo is a virtual system file in the proc file system of your machine which stores information about your CPUs. You can view this information using the cat command.

bash$ cat /proc/cpuinfo

This will output detailed information about each of your processor (CPU).


lscpu is available on most distros by default or is part of the Linux utility package. This can output very detailed cpu information to the command line.

bash$ lscpu

The output will provide an overall info about your CPU. A sample output for a two processor system would look like this

Architecture: i686
Byte Order: Little Endian
CPU(s): 2
On-line CPU(s) list: 0,1
Thread(s) per core: 1
Core(s) per socket: 2
Socket(s): 1
Vendor ID: GenuineIntel
CPU family: 6
Model: 15
Stepping: 11
CPU MHz: 2997.000
BogoMIPS: 5999.77
Virtualization: VT-x
L1d cache: 32K
L1i cache: 32K
L2 cache: 4096K

If you are looking to find your Linux OS information, then you should use other commands such as uname or lsb_release.