If you rely on somebody else for managed hosting of your Linux servers, you might not always know exactly what type of server you're actually running on. There's a quick and easy way to figure this out, however.

Simply type in the following command at the prompt:

cat /proc/cpuinfo

And then you'll see a big long list of all the processor in the system, along with all the information about them, which should look something like this:

processor : 0

vendor_id : GenuineIntel

cpu family : 6

model : 26

model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU L5520 @ 2.27GHz

stepping : 5

cpu MHz : 2267.545

cache size : 8192 KB

physical id : 0

siblings : 4

core id : 0

cpu cores : 4

fdiv_bug : no

hlt_bug : no

f00f_bug : no

coma_bug : no

fpu : yes

fpu_exception : yes

cpuid level : 11

wp : yes

flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge

mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe

nx rdtscp lm constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl est tm2 xtpr popcnt

bogomips : 4538.12

You'll see in this example that we're running on an Intel Xeon L5520 running at 2.27GHz... and if we had shown the full example you'd see that there are actually 4 cores on the machine.