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With hyper-threading and multi-core CPUs, it isn't easy to find out how many physical CPUs (or sockets) there are on a server. Recently we were given such a task to ensure we were properly licensed. Since Microsoft's CPU licensing scheme is per socket, we can't just look in Task Manager or Computer Properties as we'll see the virtual CPU count. Due to this, I did some searching to find out if the number of sockets could be queried in the registry or if there was some other method available. I was unable to find any registry solution, but I was able to find three free tools.