(1) The heart, or central part, of something. The core of a network is its backbone. A core program would be the primary routines that serve the entire application (see
kernel).
(2) A processing unit within a CPU. Today's CPUs have multiple cores, all operating simultaneously See
multicore,
dual core,
soft core and
hard core.
(3) (Core) A family of CPUs from Intel. Introduced in 2006, the Core line superseded Pentium. See
Intel Core.
(4) A round magnetic doughnut that represents one bit in an earlier core storage system, common in the 1960s. A computer's main memory used to be called (see
core storage).