A multi-core processor (or chip-level multiprocessor, CMP) combines two or more independent cores into a single package composed of a single integrated circuit (IC), called a die, or more dies packaged together. The individual core is normally a CPU. A dual-core processor contains two cores, and a quad-core processor contains four cores. A multi-core microprocessor implements multiprocessing in a single physical package. A processor with all cores on a single die is called a monolithic processor. Cores in a multicore device may share a single coherent cache at the highest on-device cache level (e.g. L2 for the Intel Core 2) or may have separate caches (e.g. current AMD dual-core processors). The processors also share the same interconnect to the rest of the system. Each "core" independently implements optimizations such as superscalar execution, pipelining, and multithreading. A system with n cores is effective when it is presented with n or more threads concurrently. The most commercially significant (or at least the most 'obvious') multi-core processors are those used in personal computers (primarily from Intel and AMD) and game consoles (e.g., the eight-core Cell processor in the PS3 and the three-core Xenon processor in the Xbox 360). In this context, "multi" typically means a relatively small number of cores. However, the technology is widely used in other technology areas, especially those of embedded processors, such as network processors and digital signal processors, and in GPUs.

The amount of performance gained by the use of a multicore processor depends on the problem being solved and the algorithms used, as well as their implementation in software (Amdahl's law). For so-called "embarrassingly parallel" problems, a dual-core processor with two cores at 2GHz may perform very nearly as fast as a single core of 4GHz. Other problems though may not yield so much speedup. This all assumes however that the software has been designed to take advantage of available parallelism. If it hasn't, there will not be any speedup at all. However, the processor will multitask better since it can run two programs at once, one on each core.

Terminology

There is some discrepancy in the semantics by which the terms multi-core and dual-core are defined. Most commonly they are used to refer to some sort of central processing unit (CPU), but are sometimes also applied to digital signal processors (DSP) and System-on-a-chip (SoC). Additionally, some use these terms to refer only to multi-core microprocessors that are manufactured on the same integrated circuit die. These people generally refer to separate microprocessor dies in the same package by another name, such as multi-chip module, double coreFact: date=October 2007, or even twin core.Fact: date=October 2007 This article uses both the terms "multi-core" and "dual-core" to reference microelectronic CPUs manufactured on the same integrated circuit, unless otherwise noted.