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Why does so much of my processor power stay idle?
- Thread starter BigPrince
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Either they weren't optimized to take advantage of multiple cores (assuming you have such a machine..), or there's a bottleneck somewhere (e.g. a hard drive).
Probably because the processor is not the component in the system that is holding everything up. Your computer may lack RAM or the hard drive maybe too slow or any number of reasons.
Just because your processor is not running at 100% does not mean that your computer is not maxed out. It just means that another component is a bottleneck in the system.
Saying that, in your case I believe that is probably because you are not doing anything which requires 100% of your CPU. What is it that you are trying to do?
iDVD is capable of using all the cores in your system. It is most likely a bottleneck elsewhere. I wouldn't worry about CPU utilisation too much though.
Agreed. The current processors are overkill for 90% of users. The only time I use 100% of my processor is doing handbrake encodes. There comes a point when you can't move data through the system fast enough, hence the reason we get faster buses and faster memory every year.
Ya or iStat Pro, I forget. I kept clicking on it and watching the percentages to see what was going on.
I tempted to change out the hard drive myself for the 7200 rpm one.
Memory can't be much of a bottleneck because I have not even hit close to 100% used yet.
I tempted to change out the hard drive myself for the 7200 rpm one.
Memory can't be much of a bottleneck because I have not even hit close to 100% used yet.
. So I gotta wait until there are 2 gig sticks at 800 mhz being made lol. Can the SR chipset work with that?
I seriously doubt it. At best it would underclock the memory, at worst it wouldn't work at all.
My guess is that the rendering goes through different phases. I don't have deep knowledge of what it takes to prepare and render your DVD, but maybe the first phase you saw when it only used 50% was a hard drive intensive phase, like for instance gathering information about all the different files and stuff like that, and then when it got to the actual encoding of video it allowed the processor to work at 115% because the hard drive became less of a bottleneck.