General Question

loupus's avatar

What OSX apps take advantage of multi-core processors?

Asked by loupus (146points) July 28th, 2007 from iPhone

I got a Mac Pro mostly for the onboard storage (up to 3TB over four drive bays). I'm certainly not taking advantage of most of my Mac's horsepower. It has two dual-core 2.66GHz processors, but how can I find out what apps actually use the additional processor cores? I've noticed some apps show >100% CPU usage in Activity Monitor. I assume that means they're using multiple cores. I'm particularly interested in speeding up video conversion (ffmpegx et al).

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3 Answers

bpeoples's avatar

ffmpegx definately doesn't (in Activity monitor you can get it to show both cpu's separately). However, you *can* run two ffmpegx processes simultaneously, and it'll cap both processors pretty close to full.

Most photo stuff seems OK with both processors, (Bibble Pro, Lightroom, etc.), and that's about all I do that's processor heavy.

bpeoples (2551points)“Great Answer” (2points) Flag as…
TysonEdwards's avatar

Handbrake is pretty good for SMP.
Aside from that one, there really hasn't been that much that's needed to be highly multi-processor efficient.

I mean, there is the obvious ones like Maya and Photoshop, but I think that you were looking for less specialty apps.

TysonEdwards (126points)“Great Answer” (0points) Flag as…
loupus's avatar

@bpeoples: how do you make activity monitor display multiple processors? Are you talking about the four-columned graph?

Also, is there a way to launch two instances of an app other than using the terminal?

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