I asked someone I respect in the industry, whose apps I have used for a long time, including Hardware Monitor and others apps, what his opinion on this issue is. He's been my go-to man in the past for the final say or at least some really good insight. He is Dr. Marcel Bresink.
http://www.bresink.com/info.html
He wrote,
"I would guess what you are experiencing is basically the combination of
Snow Leopard's advanced power saving techniques and Intel's Turbo Boost feature
which is present in all CPUs based on Core i7 technology.
If the total load on the system is low, Snow Leopard will first
* stop to schedule processes for the virtual Hyperthreading cores (cores 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16),
* stop to schedule processes for the secondary processor package (cores 9, 11, 13, 15),
* stop to schedule processes for the first processor package (cores 1, 3, 5, 7),
in this order.
When a processor core has nothing to do, the core, or the whole processor package,
respectively, will be powered down. A core without power will have a much lower
temperature than normal.
iTunes is an application which performs continuous real-time signal processing in
one thread of execution. If a system with Intel Core i7 processor detects the
situation "one core can be operated continuously, the other cores are idling",
it will activate Turbo Boost, which means it will overclock one core and
shut down the others. Overclocking will be done up to a degree where the
overall temperature of the processor package is still within acceptable limits.
The lower-than-average temperature readings during idle times, and the
higher-than-average readings during Turbo Boost result in the temperature
behavior you have observed when running iTunes on a system with low load.
The temperature readings themselves are uncritical. You bascially cannot overheat
an Intel procesor core, because it will automatically throttle its speed before
this could happen."
So I'm guessing that prior MPs to 09' were not Core i7, and Turbo Boost is not a feature prior to Nehalem either?
This seems to be the way other have been testing from what I've gathered by the posts.
