Knowing the number of CPU cores a particular Mac has can be useful for performance optimization, stress testing, compatibility, and to otherwise make informed decisions about system performance on a Mac. For example, maybe you want to make sure you have multiple cores available to run a virtual machine, or you want to spawn a number of processes that is equivalent to the number of cores on a Mac for a stress test.

We’ll show you several ways to determine how many CPU cores a Mac computer has, including finding this information from the GUI, and from the command…