> I only care about how it performs and how much it costs.
> I honestly don't care if my CPU has 2 cores or 20 cores
So first means: "my only concerns are performance and cost". What determines performance and cost? Primary answer: number of cores. If you care about performance, you care if the CPU has 2 or 20 cores. If you care about cost, you care if the CPU has 2 or 20 cores. You might not articulate your concerns in this way, but they are intimately bound together.
If you only care about "good enough" performance and "in my range" cost, then your concerns are still bound up with core count.
So what's your apparently more correct understanding of some of those words?