Does Grand Central Dispatch Work System Wide?

[AdColvin]

I'm aware that GCD allows developers to make their apps multithreaded in a simpler way. However, if we only consider this, the benefits of having a multi-core system are then dependent on the developer. And I'm aware that not many developers are taking full advantage of GCD at the moment.

However, if I have one app that's encoding some video, one that's playing a game and I have a few photoshop windows open for example, does GCD distribute those tasks among the number of cores that are available? Thus making it system wide and not dependant on each app?

In this way, the number of cores that you choose to have seems to depend mainly on how many apps you have working at the same time. Am I right?

I really don't know much about this as you can probably tell.
Any help appreciated,
Thanks,
Adam

 

[Hellhammer]

The workload should be distributed to all or at least most cores since OS X supports multithreading. If you have a Mac Pro, just launch several CPU intensive tasks and take a look at Activity Monitor. It can show the activity of each core.

 

[CaoCao]

GCD is system wide

 

[VirtualRain]

You might get more responses if you posted this in the OSX forum.