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Core Duo won't saturate?

D

Demon Hunter

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Mar 30, 2004
2,284
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I can't saturate either core in Activity Monitor! What's going on? If a process is going slowly, shouldn't 100% of a core be used?

H.264 1080p gets 50% out of each...
 
If it can play that 1080p with no dropped frames, there is nothing to worry about. Just do APPLE-I in Quicktime and it should tell you the FPS, if it's running at the full frame rate you are fine.
 
If you want to max out your processors you can always type "yes > /dev/null" in two different terminal windows...
 
dferrara said:
H.264 1080p gets 50% out of each...
Click to expand...
That is odd. Have you tried encoding a few things at the same time, maybe one in Final Cut, one in Quicktime, and another in iDVD or something, just to see that that pushes them any more?

FF_productions said:
If it can play that 1080p with no dropped frames, there is nothing to worry about. Just do APPLE-I in Quicktime and it should tell you the FPS, if it's running at the full frame rate you are fine.
Click to expand...
I would guess he's talking about rendering, not playback.
 
does anyone know how to tell fink to use both cores for compiling? In Linux I just need to pass the "-j" flag to parallelize make. How do I do that in fink?
 
x86 said:
If you want to max out your processors you can always type "yes > /dev/null" in two different terminal windows...
Click to expand...

Thanks, I was wondering what that command was.
 
Answer:

Most apps are not coded/designed to use over 100% of a CPU, thus they will never go over 100%. This is great for multitasking, but not if you need that added boost of performance.

As the multi core trend progresses, so will the number of app will support over 100%.
 
bbrosemer said:
Why when I am encoding a DVD in idvd I am only getting about 50% CPU usage...?
Click to expand...

How much RAM do you have?

I don't know much about video encoding but a DVD is probably sitting between 2-4.7 GB of data. If there is not much RAM for storing the data then there will have to be many, many disk accesses in order to retrieve the data for encoding and storing the encoded data. Since disk accesses are the slowest form of memory access it is entirely possible that you are not able to get the processor enough data in order to get full utilization.

Of course that's just my current theory.
 
atszyman said:
How much RAM do you have?

I don't know much about video encoding but a DVD is probably sitting between 2-4.7 GB of data. If there is not much RAM for storing the data then there will have to be many, many disk accesses in order to retrieve the data for encoding and storing the encoded data. Since disk accesses are the slowest form of memory access it is entirely possible that you are not able to get the processor enough data in order to get full utilization.

Of course that's just my current theory.
Click to expand...
Thats not it I have 2 gigs of Ram.
 
bbrosemer said:
Why when I am encoding a DVD in idvd I am only getting about 50% CPU usage...?
Click to expand...


Is that 50% of 200% ?

Where abouts in the Activity Monitor are you reading that figure? In the summery at the bottom or in the list or programs?

The summery will only go up to 100% no matter how many cores you have. So in theory 50% in the summery on a CoreDuo is 100% of one of the cores.

Like I said before in this thread, not all programs are designed with multi-threading in mind and thus will not go over 100% of one core.
 
AlexSpark said:
Is that 50% of 200% ?

Where abouts in the Activity Monitor are you reading that figure? In the summery at the bottom or in the list or programs?

The summery will only go up to 100% no matter how many cores you have. So in theory 50% in the summery on a CoreDuo is 100% of one of the cores.

Like I said before in this thread, not all programs are designed with multi-threading in mind and thus will not go over 100% of one core.
Click to expand...
You would think idvd seeing that it is designed for the Mac and is UB for the Intel would like to max the cores out.
 
bbrosemer said:
You would think idvd seeing that it is designed for the Mac and is UB for the Intel would like to max the cores out.
Click to expand...

iMove has been around a heck of a lot longer than Apple has been releasing Multi Core systems for. Well maybe the PowerMac ... :/

The fact that you bring up UB and Intel has no impacked on the fact that iMovie isnt a Multi-Threaded program.


Ive owned a PowerMac G5 for about 2 years now, most of my apps arnt Multi-Threaded. A good example is that ive been encoding Flash videos for a project, now coming upto 24 hours. If it was a multi-threaded program than it would of taken half the time. These are inherent trade offs off muti-core systems.

The upside is that I still have another 100% i can use to do other things while my video is encoding.
 
AlexSpark said:
iMove has been around a heck of a lot longer than Apple has been releasing Multi Core systems for. Well maybe the PowerMac ... :/

The fact that you bring up UB and Intel has no impacked on the fact that iMovie isnt a Multi-Threaded program.


Ive owned a PowerMac G5 for about 2 years now, most of my apps arnt Multi-Threaded. A good example is that ive been encoding Flash videos for a project, now coming upto 24 hours. If it was a multi-threaded program than it would of taken half the time. These are inherent trade offs off muti-core systems.

The upside is that I still have another 100% i can use to do other things while my video is encoding.
Click to expand...
Ok very true just wanted to make sure more or less that this was normal.
 
What system is this on? If it is a laptop you might check your Energy Settings to see if it is on battery saver mode which I believe limits the processors as well. Just a thought.
 
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