First two cores on 2021 M1 Max MacBook Pro always reading 100% on idle with no apps running???

Josh MTV Australia wrote:

Hi there!

It seems the first two cores on my top spec M1 Max (64gb ram) 2021 MacBook Pro always read 100%, when idle with no apps running..

Wondering if you can shed some light on the below reading i got from iStat Menus (v6.60). Is this just how the M1 Max chip reads idle?

https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/ea116095-be14-4704-bbaa-2fb97050d524

I've used iStat Menus for years on my iMac Pro, and it has historically always read accurrately on my intel based iMac Pro.

On the below larger graph, the light blue shows "user" cpu load, and the red shows "system" cpu load.

Is there an issue with my CPU or is this just how M1 chips operate under idle? Weirrrrd.

I should say, so far the machine seems quick and snappy. However am yet to load any pro video or audio apps on yet, so have not done thorough performance testing. It benchmarked on point with other M1 Max machines on Geekbench 5.

Thanks for your help in advance!

Compare that to your Activity Monitor.app>Window>CPU Usage

Activity Monitor User Guide for Mac - Apple Support

It's normal for the first two cores to be fully loaded now and then when the system is idle. These are the "Icestorm" efficiency cores. MacOS tends to schedule low priority tasks like Spotlight indexing and Time Machine backups to these cores, leaving the other eight "Firestorm" performance cores free to run user applications.

You can find a better explanation of this here:

https://eclecticlight.co/2021/11/04/m1-pro-first-impressions-2-core-management-and-cpu-performance/

https://eclecticlight.co/2021/08/24/whats-in-an-m1-chip-and-what-does-it-do-differently/