There are times that I get on a Linux box and want to know about some of the resources available to me. There are tools that can accomplish this, but there are some files that contain basic settings about the resources available to the system. One of those file is:

/proc/cpuinfo

This file contains information about the Processors and you can do a simple:

more /proc/cpuinfo

to see all the details or you can grep for certain fields:

processor       -- This will show you how many processor entries there are.
cpu MHz  or MHz -- This will show you the speed of the processors.
cache size      -- This will show you the cache size available to the processor.
model           -- This will show you the type and model of the processor you are using.

There are quite a few more fields, but these are the ones that I check the most.