How To See the Processor Model Number/Speed on Linux

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.