[corgi75082]

First off, this is my newbie post, so please forgive me if I'm bringing up something already discussed...

Since I've had my iMac 20" core duo (which is only about a week), I've wondered how well the two cores interact in day-to-day OS and program operations...from what I've read Intel put a lot of engineering into the Core Duo to make sure the two cores actually worked in tandem versus conflicting with each other.

My recollection on past dual-core machines is that generally speaking one does most of the work, unless code is written to take advantage of the second.

Anyway, I opened the "Activity Monitor" utility program and looked at the CPU Usage while I worked and saw both running more or less evenly. Although it was interesting to see on some CPU-intensive operations the two cores would occasionally see-saw up and down as if they were trading off work.

This less-than-scientific observation leads me to believe that the two cores, along with the OS, really do play nice and share work to get the job done.

[fhoubi]

Nope, OS X shedules pretty sweet. F.e. fire up iTunes and do visualisations. About 50% cpu of one core for iTunes. Now fire up Sigma Chess, do an auto/demo play with max. strength. As Sigma only uses one core, almost all other threads are moved to the free core, and Sigma Chess gets 90..99% cpu of the other core. Nice

[WOPR]

Originally Posted by corgi75082

Anyway, I opened the "Activity Monitor" utility program and looked at the CPU Usage while I worked and saw both running more or less evenly. Although it was interesting to see on some CPU-intensive operations the two cores would occasionally see-saw up and down as if they were trading off work.

My dual G5 does the same thing so I think it's more of an OS X thing than anything Intel have done.