Hi(Bonjour),
Despite I run Apple Motion on the latest and most powerful intel iMac, Apple Motion seems to use only 9 of ten cores. Apple Monitor give this usage when monitoring CPU and GPU access as you can see in this screen capture. Does Apple maximize their software to get the most from my computer? How is it possible?
Thank you,
Michel B.
iMac 27″, macOS 10.12
This looks perfectly normal.
Were there intensive tasks being performed at the time? Which ones?
Some things can be run in parallel on multiple cores, some not. It is up to the OS to distribute the load on the available cores, and it is up to the application programming to program its tasks in a way that is amenable to parallelism (using threads or processes). In many circumstances there is no gain from splitting a workload into parallel threads: the overload of managing the threads can sometimes be greater than the speed up.
To compound things, your mac has a feature called hyperthreading: there are 10 physical cores in the cpu, but they appear as if 20 to the OS. So each pair of cores you see is like a kiosk with two windows and two queues of customers, but only one employee serving both. Thus there are diminishing returns as you start fill up past half the cores.
This looks perfectly normal.
Were there intensive tasks being performed at the time? Which ones?
Some things can be run in parallel on multiple cores, some not. It is up to the OS to distribute the load on the available cores, and it is up to the application programming to program its tasks in a way that is amenable to parallelism (using threads or processes). In many circumstances there is no gain from splitting a workload into parallel threads: the overload of managing the threads can sometimes be greater than the speed up.
To compound things, your mac has a feature called hyperthreading: there are 10 physical cores in the cpu, but they appear as if 20 to the OS. So each pair of cores you see is like a kiosk with two windows and two queues of customers, but only one employee serving both. Thus there are diminishing returns as you start fill up past half the cores.
Apple Motion and CPU/GPU usage
