The Intel processor I purchased has 4 physical cores (quad-core), but can complete 8 logical processes at the same time. What Intel technology does my processor support?

A i7-2670QM processor has 4 cores. But it can run 8 threads in parallel. This means that it only has 4 processing units (Cores) but has support in hardware to run 8 threads in parallel.

Explanation:

Logical cores are the number of Physical cores times the number of threads that can run on each cores. If a processor has 4 cores, but it can run 8 threads in parallel, means that it only has 4 physical cores (processing units). But its hardware can support up to 8 threads in parallel. This means that a maximum of four jobs run in on the Cores, if one of the jobs stall due to for example memory access another thread can very fast start executing on the free Core with very little penalty. More modern processors handle hyper threading better than older processors.