How to determine the number of physical processors on a client in PowerShell.

There seems to be a bit of a debate on the internet about this one. I executed the following PowerShell command on 2 different computers:

Get-WMIObject Win32_ComputerSystem | FL *

I executed it on a laptop with 1 physical processor with 4 logical processors and received the following results:

I then executed it again on a desktop with 1 physical processor and 8 logical processors:

From my testing, the NumberOfProcessors property seems to provide the correct number of physical processors.

I got curios and ran that PowerShell code on a virtual machine with 1 assigned processor:

I also ran it on a virtual machine with 4 processors assigned to it:

OK, so how do you know if you are looking at a virtual machine or a physical machine? A couple of properties higher in the list you will see Model. If this was a virtual machine, it would say Virtual Machine.

Comments

Brandon Ryan said…

To get the number of physical CPU sockets, you must count how many objects are returned by "get-wmiobject win32_processor"

---

$myArray = @()
$myArray += get-wmiobject win32_processor
$myArray.Count

January 20, 2012 at 10:40 AM

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