How can a computer process use 399.6% of the CPU? Isn’t 100% the maximum?
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Back in the “good old days” our CPUs were simple. One computer, one CPU. Our tools would simply check how many ticks a given process took, divide that with the total number of ticks per second and presto you have a CPU%. That just doesn’t work with modern CPUs, but our tools are the same.
Most computers today actually have more than a single CPU in them. While you may only see one CPU chip, they mostly come with several “cores” which is a fancy way of saying CPU. 2, 4, 8 or even 16 cores is not uncommon for consumer grade PCs these days. Each physical core is a whole CPU and they work in parallel. Technically each core doubles the speed but not entirely true. There are also virtual cores – which makes CPUs show twice as many cores as they really have. Each core is treated as a full CPU – meaning if you have 16 cores, you have 1600% cpu. It’s why some systems now use milicores instead. It’s a lot easier to understand that 5000 milicores out of 16000 is less than half the total capacity; % as you indicated gives you an expectation that 100% is full.
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