MBP i7 question

Got this MBP around 4 weeks ago. Everything is fantastic, but I saw that my cores were not being fully used when needed.
Firstly I was running Final Cut 7 and exporting a movie. I looked at my activity monitor and only cores 1 & 3 were being used (80-90% ish), but 2&4 were just doing nothing. They were obviously doing something but must of been jumping around 10-20%. (CPU Temp around 85)
I then started doing an export in quicktime and all 4 cores were maxed out. The difference that I saw in the activity monitor was Finalcut being the process, which was using the CPU (around 150-160%). But when using quicktime, (fully maxed out like it should be) it was using the Core media authoring session helper as the process.
Is this correct then, because Im also running final cut (same version) on my imac which maxes out when exporting on its quad-cores (I know its different but same software).
The same thing happens when idle too but on a smaller scale.
Any explanation would be much appreciated.
Thanks,
Kiotic
Message was edited by: Kiotic

Welcome to Apple Discussions!
Your Energy saver I think controls how many cores are used for processes. But rememeber, these may just be differences in how the processors are designed for various machines. An i7 in a notebook may not have the cooling than an iMac has and they have optimize it better.

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