The MBP and Processor Usage

[jur1st]

I've noticed a difference in my Mac than I had in my PC which confuses me. If I'm doing something processor intensive like exporting a slide show to iDVD, or encoding the DVD, I would usually expect the processor to max out with the fans screaming for releif from the torture I'm putting them under.

This doesn't happen, though. Is there some way I can dump more power into these processes to speed things up?

Thanks,

jb

 

[yippy]

Are you sure it isn't maxing out the power? The fans never get very loud so they may be running and you don't notice. If you are sure that the processor is not at max then I can think of two things that could cause this off hand:

1. Whatever you are doing is a single threaded task. Many programs, especially games and I think many kinds of encoding, cannot take advantage of having the two processor cores. This means that they will max out one core but not use the second. This is a limitation of most all software except for the really high end professional programs.

2. Something else is the bottle neck. Exporting a slide show or encoding when it doesn't have to compress it a lot is often more dependent on the hard drive than the CPU. In other words, it can't do the task any faster than it can write it to disk. And in this case the CPU can encode faster than the hard disk can write so it slows down to the same speed as the hard drive.