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?

Answer 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.

Answer 2

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

Processor information can be obtained via GetSystemInfo.

Answer 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;