Does the plain MATLAB license without Parallel Computing Toolbox allow me to access multiple cores on a single CPU

I've been told that if I do not have the Parallel Computing Toolbox then I will not be able to use more than a single core on my multi-core CPU. Is this correct?

Answer 1

[Matt J]

Even without the Parallel Computing Toolbox, many builtin functions and linear algebra operations are still multi-threaded behind the scenes and will use your cores to the best advantage they know how. You simply won't be able to use the toolbox functions to write your own parallelized Mcode.

[Walter Roberson]

A note: MATLAB has an idea of how expensive it is to invoke the multithreaded versions, so it only invokes them if the size of the data being worked with is "large enough", where the necessary size varies with the operation being carried out.