356 percent?

[BasilFawlty]

I just installed 8 more GB of memory from OWC (for total of 12) and I went to Activity Monitor to see how must I was using. Well, the memory usage was fine, but I don't understand the %CPU numbers? I happened to be using handbrake at the time and handbrake was showing 356% CPU? How is this possible? Obviously the %CPU isn't based on 100%. Can someone explain this to a relatively new iMac user?

 

[Intell]

Each thread is 100%. So if its using three threads, its using 300%.

 

[iSayuSay]

Yeah .. So an i7 can reach up to 800% on maximum usage due to it has 8threads in total.