Discovering CPU model and features
The central processor is certainly one of the most important hardware components, and there are many reasons to find out detailed information about it. The CPU model name or number and frequency are the first things you would look at to find out the age and overall performance of a machine. However, there are more details that are often useful in practice. For example, the number of CPU cores is important to know if you run applications that support multiple worker threads or processes (such as make -j2). Trying to run more processes than there are CPUs may slow the application down because some of those processes end up waiting for an available CPU, so you may want to run fewer worker processes to avoid overloading the machine.
It’s also important to know whether your CPU supports specific acceleration technologies such as AES-NI or Intel QuickAssist. If they are available, some applications can perform much better if you enable support...
