on 2012-05-09 9:02 Dinse, Gregg (NIH/NIEHS) [E] wrote
Did you get the impression that Lion decides when to activate the extra
(logical) cores, as opposed to the user having to decide (and possibly make a
choice in some preference panel)?
it is automatic, not user-driven, but i don't know the mechanism; it's possible
that energy saver settings would have an effect
Although I always see 16 bars (in iStat Menus or MenuMeters), usually only
every other bar moves above zero. So, my guess is that typically only the 8
(physical) cores are being used, but the other 8 (logical) cores can be
activated (automatically) if a task can benefit from parallelism.
i use iStat Menus, and on my quad-i7 laptop, i often see some activity in the
four secondary "cores", but they don't seem to "max out" like the four primary
cores do on some tasks
i jumped from 10.5 to 10.7 at the same time i went from core2duo to quad-i7, so
i haven't seen how these CPUs might behave in iStat in previous versions
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