Activity Monitor only displays 4 of 8 cores as active

[kamilski81]

I have been watching my 'Cpu History' for the Activity monitor over the last few days and I have never seen my computer run on the 'even' cores? I run vm and am a developer so I use my computer pretty intensely, any idea what may be happening here? See my attachment for what im talking about

 

[macdudesir]

I have been watching my 'Cpu History' for the Activity monitor over the last few days and I have never seen my computer run on the 'even' cores? I run vm and am a developer so I use my computer pretty intensely, any idea what may be happening here? See my attachment for what im talking about

The "even cores" are hyper threaded cores. They only run when cpu activity is high...from your graph, its not...The attached pic is my activity monitor (macbook air, so two real, two hyper threaded)

 

[Queen6]

download GeekBench and run the stress test that will get 'all" your Core`s burning

 

[kamilski81]

So after doing some more research I found that MacBook Prox 8,2 has 1 processor and 4 cores, period.

http://www.everymac.com/systems/app...-15-early-2011-unibody-thunderbolt-specs.html


Thanks for recommending GeekBench, cool sofware.

 

[w00t951]

It's pretty common knowledge that the Macbook 15" has an i7 Sandy Bridge quad core processor. One physical processor, four physical cores, four virtual cores.

 

[macdudesir]

So after doing some more research I found that MacBook Prox 8,2 has 1 processor and 4 cores, period.

http://www.everymac.com/systems/app...-15-early-2011-unibody-thunderbolt-specs.html


Thanks for recommending GeekBench, cool sofware.

...that's somewhat right I guess...they have 4 cores...but each core has two threads...so the OS sees 8 cores and processes as 8 cores. If you do something processor intinsive I garuntee you will see those other cores come on

EDIT: should have read further in to the link...it does mention hyper threading. sorry

 

[theSeb]

So after doing some more research I found that MacBook Prox 8,2 has 1 processor and 4 cores, period.

http://www.everymac.com/systems/app...-15-early-2011-unibody-thunderbolt-specs.html


Thanks for recommending GeekBench, cool sofware.

Wow! Really? Thanks for letting us know! Perhaps you should do some more research on hyper threading?

 

[thundersteele]

I have been watching my 'Cpu History' for the Activity monitor over the last few days and I have never seen my computer run on the 'even' cores?

Technically these are the even cores. Internally they are adressed as core 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7, so the ones that are active in the screenshot are the cores 0,2,4,6

I run vm and am a developer so I use my computer pretty intensely, any idea what may be happening here? See my attachment for what im talking about

It is somewhat surprising that a) you didn't know how many cores your quad core CPU has, and b) you are not familiar with the concept of hyper-threading.