lscpu on Linux | AMD & Intel Topology

lscpu is the fastest answer to “how many CPUs does this host really expose?” — and whether an AMD box is one big L3 domain or split across NUMA nodes. Intel hosts show the same fields; values differ by generation (Xeon Gold vs older E5).

Also read: AMD vs Intel comparison,
load average & cores.

Human summary

Default lscpu prints sockets, cores, threads, model name, and hypervisor hint.

bashsummary

lscpu

Extended CPU list

lscpu -e or -e -a lists each logical CPU with socket, core, and NUMA node — essential for pinning.

bashextended

lscpu -e -a | head
lscpu -p=CPU,CORE,SOCKET,NODE | head

Caches and flags

L1d/L1i/L2/L3 and Flags (vmx/svm for virtualization) help before enabling KVM or nested virt.

bashflags

lscpu | grep -E 'Model name|Flags|L3'
# Flags: ... svm ...   (AMD-V)
# Flags: ... vmx ...   (Intel VT-x)

AMD vs Intel on the same field

NUMA node(s) may read 1 on a laptop but 4+ on dual-socket EPYC. Intel single-socket Xeon often shows NUMA node 0 only — still run numactl --hardware on large DB hosts.

WarningContainer limits (cpuset, cgroup v2 cpu.max) can make nproc lie about the whole machine — check limits inside and outside the namespace.

Quick Reference

Quick: lscpu
Table: lscpu -e -a
vCPU flags: vmx / svm

lscpu on Linux: Read AMD and Intel CPU Topology