Multicore Central Processing Units (CPU) are becoming the standard for the current era of processors through the significant level of performance that CPUs offer. This includes multiple multicore architectures, different levels of performance, and with the variety of architectures, it becomes necessary to compare multicore architectures to make sure that the performance aligns itself with the expected specifications. This paper surveys the proper ways of selecting multicore CPU performance techniques, examples of metrics used in multicore CPUs performance studies, factors that affect the performance of multicore CPU and the benchmarks that target multicore CPU aspects of performance.