8 core never run more that 50%

Question

I have a 8 core with 16g of ram is use final cut, and imovie ( sometimes) when I'm finished with a project I use compressor to output. Using Qmaster with 8 instances selected, My cp monitor runs at only 50% on all... I have look in this and other forums but have found noting definitive about hoe to correct this. ( I never seem to get any of the processors to run at 100%, well no more that 1 for a short period)

Answer 1

Yes, of course, you are absolutely right.
Your questions are very good ones indeed. So, I think you and other Mac users with CPU demanding tasks to process deserve some answers.
Yes, it is a software design issue. An application, running only a single process, cannot utilize more than one CPU. It needs to divide its job into several chunks and start new processes for each sub-task. The operating system can then schedule CPU cycles to each and every process, many of them in paralell (concurrently) using all the cores available. This is not done by itself, though, the application must be designed and written with great care in order to use all cores efficiently.
As Martin Pace correctly observed, BitVice will use all your 8 cores, unless you tell it to use "Low Priority". That is because it was designed to spawn as many processes as needed, for ultimate CPU usage, depending on how much CPU power is available at the time of excecution. The result is that, as long as your disk system is fast enough, all your cores may (will) get maxed out. This does not mean that everything else stops, though, because all other processes running on the system will get their fair share of CPU time. The bottom line is that BitVice is so carefully written that it will be able to utilize all the surplus CPU cycles, from every core, that none of other processes have any demand for. You can run as many applications as you like, at the same time. At least if they are behaving nearly as responsible as you can expect from applications that you paid good money for.
That is exactly what you were asking for, right?
If so, you are welcome to try the free demo versions of Innobits products.
http://www.innobits.com/downloads.html
However, when you rather want to save electric energy, instead of time, you can of course choose a lower priority setting in BitVice, so that most of the CPUs (cores) will be idling, thinking there is nothing more around worthwhile spending CPU cycles on. The lowest priority will inhibit any parallel computing at all.