The CPU saturation challenge
I’m having a hard time saturating my new Mac Pro’s eight CPU cores.
- DVD-to-MPEG4/H.264: Handbrake’s MPEG-4 mode lets a few of the cores get up to about 20% use. Encoding to H.264 makes a few cores hit about 40%. As far as I can tell, this is limited by the DVD drive’s read speed.
- Video transcoding: Nope. Quicktime’s H.264 export makes all of the cores hit 25% or so. VisualHub (ffmpeg front-end) converting WMV to H.264 only uses 1-2 cores at best, and even then, they aren’t exceeding 30%. I can’t tell what the limit is here — the hard drives aren’t being constantly accessed, so maybe it’s an inefficient codec or some more obscure bottleneck (like RAM access times).
- Supreme Commander on high-everything: Not even close. Maxes out 2 cores. The others remain almost entirely untouched.
But there was one thing that could do it:
- .Mac iDisk offline sync: Tell .Mac to maintain an offline copy of your iDisk, and the FileSync process will consume 100% of all eight CPU cores until you forcibly kill it.
I knew synchronization was a tricky problem, but it can’t be that difficult.