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I am using ubuntu 22, with an i7 12th gen gpu with 16gb ram and Nvidia rtx 3060 gpu with 6GB vram.

While doing heavy tasks such as gaming I have observed in the activity monitor that only 2 CPU out of 16 ( mainly cpu5 and CPU 7 ) are being utilized to 100 percent whereas the other CPU hover near to 0.

I have also observed that the graph of CPU 5 and CPU 7 are almost mirror images, if CPU 5 is being utilized then CPU 7 goes down and vice versa, I am not sure why is this happening and why the other CPU is not being utilized.

This is not only limited to gaming though whenever I hear fans running or doing some task such as browsing I observe the similar pattern. I even tried the solution present here but it does not seem to solve the problem I think I am unable to add the image yet because of reputation so giving you guys with the link to image hope this helps 1

kanehekili
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Adarsh
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    Just guessing, but your workload is probably single threaded, so can only run on a single CPU at a time, then when the CPU gets hot, the OS switches to another one. – ubfan1 Jan 25 '23 at 19:53
  • @ubfan1 I've seen multithreaded code use while loops without a sleep to check states which gets you a single thread that is pegged all the time while the others barely use any because its so fast. But yea, the point is it's about the software, not the OS. – rtaft Jan 26 '23 at 13:18

1 Answers1

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To check your cpus install stress:

sudo apt install stress

Then issue the command:

stress -c 16

assuming you have 8 cpus with 16 threads. Check your monitors now - all cpus should be on 100%

End the test with Crtl+c

Since you tested with "games": Applications that render heavily usually pass as much load as possible to your GPU.

kanehekili
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  • thank you @kanehekili when I run stress -c 16 all the cpu were at 100, so if I get it correctly it all depends on the software and not the OS, so I am just curious are there any other single threaded softwares out there that I can try? cause I am still thinking while running single threaded instead of running any CPU why only 5 and 7 are being used? in the long run wouldn't it result in wear and tear of that specific CPU? – Adarsh Jan 26 '23 at 17:09
  • Gradle (a tool to build software) is multiprocessing, But all browsers are multithreaded. Depending on your hardware and the graphic load, a lot of the load is passed to the GPU - so your CPU won't have much to do. With games, I assume the latter. – kanehekili Jan 26 '23 at 19:47