Can someone give a good example of why you would want to turn one of two CPU's off? What's the point? Can you turn it off at any time, or is this something better saved for a startup item approach?


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It's a developer extra - if you're debugging stuff that runs on multiple threads, you can disable all cores but one to force stuff to run if not serially, then at least not strictly concurrently. (Of course, you can do this in code as well, even to the point of 'pinning' some code to a specific core.) There's probably a bunch of other uses for it if you're doing hardware-related development, like device drivers, but I'm not sure since I don't do that.

You can change the number of active processor cores at any time. It's not a set-and-then-restart sort of thing.

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also, although im not sure how much if any power it saves, but it sure seems like one would save power on a laptop by only using one core opposed to two. But, i may be wrong because i know that the reduced proccesor setting does do a good job at saving power, not sure if it turns off any cores or what it does though.

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I guess its just good for development, because on intel core duo machines, it does not save power at all when you disable one core. The cpu is designed to run much more efficiently with 2 cores active.

This may be different when it comes to G5. but the dual core machines its pointless to disable one core.

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Back in the early days of OSX, some programs would only run properly on 1 CPU. The user would need to turn off CPU 2. No longer an issue.

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