How to determine the hardware (CPU and RAM) on a machine?

Question

I'm working on a cross platform profiling suite, and would like to add information about the machine's CPU (architecture/clock speed/cores) and RAM(total) to the report of each run. Currently I need to target Windows and Unix, so I need methods to obtain this information from both platforms, any clues?

Edit: Thanks for the great answers, Now I got CPU architecture, CPU number of cores and total Memory, but I'm still lacking a clockspeed for the CPU any ideas for that one?

Solution 1

Here is one method for getting the information you want on a Windows machine. I copied and pasted it from an actual project with some minor modifications, so feel free to clean it up to make more sense.

        int CPUInfo[4] = {-1};
        unsigned   nExIds, i =  0;
        char CPUBrandString[0x40];
        // Get the information associated with each extended ID.
        __cpuid(CPUInfo, 0x80000000);
        nExIds = CPUInfo[0];
        for (i=0x80000000; i<=nExIds; ++i)
        {
            __cpuid(CPUInfo, i);
            // Interpret CPU brand string
            if  (i == 0x80000002)
                memcpy(CPUBrandString, CPUInfo, sizeof(CPUInfo));
            else if  (i == 0x80000003)
                memcpy(CPUBrandString + 16, CPUInfo, sizeof(CPUInfo));
            else if  (i == 0x80000004)
                memcpy(CPUBrandString + 32, CPUInfo, sizeof(CPUInfo));
        }
        //string includes manufacturer, model and clockspeed
        cout << "CPU Type: " << CPUBrandString << endl;


        SYSTEM_INFO sysInfo;
        GetSystemInfo(&sysInfo);
        cout << "Number of Cores: " << sysInfo.dwNumberOfProcessors << endl;

        MEMORYSTATUSEX statex;
        statex.dwLength = sizeof (statex);
        GlobalMemoryStatusEx(&statex);
        cout << "Total System Memory: " << (statex.ullTotalPhys/1024)/1024 << "MB" << endl;

For more information, see GetSystemInfo, GlobalMemoryStatusEx and __cpuid. Although I didn't include it, you can also determine if the OS is 32 or 64 bit via the GetSystemInfo function.

Solution 2

On Windows you can use GlobalMemoryStatusEx to get the amount of actual RAM.

Processor information can be obtained via GetSystemInfo.

Solution 3

For Linux with GCC you can use a very similar solution like windows. You need to include the <cpuid.h> and you need to modify the input for the __cpuid() method based on this.

#include <cpuid.h>

char CPUBrandString[0x40];
unsigned int CPUInfo[4] = {0,0,0,0};

__cpuid(0x80000000, CPUInfo[0], CPUInfo[1], CPUInfo[2], CPUInfo[3]);
unsigned int nExIds = CPUInfo[0];

memset(CPUBrandString, 0, sizeof(CPUBrandString));

for (unsigned int i = 0x80000000; i <= nExIds; ++i)
{
    __cpuid(i, CPUInfo[0], CPUInfo[1], CPUInfo[2], CPUInfo[3]);

    if (i == 0x80000002)
        memcpy(CPUBrandString, CPUInfo, sizeof(CPUInfo));
    else if (i == 0x80000003)
        memcpy(CPUBrandString + 16, CPUInfo, sizeof(CPUInfo));
    else if (i == 0x80000004)
        memcpy(CPUBrandString + 32, CPUInfo, sizeof(CPUInfo));
}

cout << "CPU Type: " << CPUBrandString << endl;

Solution 4

On Windows to determine CPU clock speed:

double CPUSpeed()
{
    wchar_t Buffer[_MAX_PATH];
    DWORD BufSize = _MAX_PATH;
    DWORD dwMHz = _MAX_PATH;
    HKEY hKey;

    // open the key where the proc speed is hidden:
    long lError = RegOpenKeyEx(HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,
                                L"HARDWARE\\DESCRIPTION\\System\\CentralProcessor\\0",
                                0,
                                KEY_READ,
                                &hKey);
    if(lError != ERROR_SUCCESS)
    {// if the key is not found, tell the user why:
        FormatMessage(FORMAT_MESSAGE_FROM_SYSTEM,
                        NULL,
                        lError,
                        0,
                        Buffer,
                        _MAX_PATH,
                        0);
        wprintf(Buffer);
        return 0;
    }

    // query the key:
    RegQueryValueEx(hKey, L"~MHz", NULL, NULL, (LPBYTE) &dwMHz, &BufSize);
    return (double)dwMHz;
}

Solution 5

The CPU is easy. Use the cpuid instruction. I'll leave other posters to find a portable way to determine how much RAM a system has. :-)

For Linux-specific methods, you can access /proc/meminfo (and /proc/cpuinfo, if you can't be bothered to parse cpuid responses).

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Comments

[araqnid]

And presumably how to find CPU information on a processor that doesn't have any sort of CPUID instruction? ;) (Would CPUID even tell you how many cores the processor package had?)

[C. K. Young]

Read: intel.com/design/processor/applnots/241618.htm (short answer: yes). All bets are off if the CPU is too old to support cpuid, but no modern system has this issue.

[araqnid]

I was thinking that not all systems are based on i386-architecture processors. (Although aware that this possibly wasn't a situation the OP was interested in)

[C. K. Young]

Bleh, all the world's an x86/x64! :-P (Just kidding.)