MBP seems to be running half cpu. Apple no help at all.

Question

Hi! I just noticed that my normally zippy macbook is running about half speed now. I'm a video DJ, and I run a program called Serato Scratch Live. It will not scan songs 4 at a time anymore. It will only scan one song per core or virtual core.. This is a dual core CPU. I used to show 4 cores in Activity monitor, and scratchlive used to scan 4 songs at a time.. now I only show one CPU with 2 cores in Activity monitor, and I believe one of the two cores is virtual.
I've been back and forth with Apple, and had a couple Genius Bar appointments, as well as spending over an hour arguing with the alleged "senior Tech" on the phone at apple care. Apple claims that there is no way that a macbook pro will show more than the actual amount of cores unless I did something to the operating system via 3rd party apps to alter it.
I walked them over to a brand new macbook pro on the shelf at the apple store, opened activity monitor, and It showed 8 cpus. (4 core machine)
they said that's not supposed to be that way.. So i checked several others... the same result.
Intels with hyperthreading show up as 2 cpus per core.
The **** apple people insist that that's not how they come from the factory, and that that is absolutely incorrect for it to show that.
We all know that this is the case however, so I'm at a stand still.
I do not know how to tell if my CPU is running full bore. I have checked it through CHUD, the processor pallette, and the processer pref pane. It's just not making sense. Why is my macbook all of a sudden half the man it used to be?
How do I prove that it's not up to snuff?
I'm beyond frustrated with apple, and their script reading "Geniuses".
The fact is it used to show 4 CPUs  I know 2 were virtual. I understand how it works.. My point is that it now only shows 2 leading me to believe that half of my CPU is hosed.
Anyone know any tests to verify CPU integrity??
Thanks for reading this overly verbose post.

Answer 1

it's all the time now. It's like it just went Poof! and hasn't been right since.. I have tried everything I could think of to diagnose it.
I see you're in Decatur.. I'm in Gwinnett.
I have 4 (less than 2 year old) MBP's, and 2 older ones. The silver metal key model, and the mid 2009 MBP unibody that's having the problem. I've never had any heat issues ever except for a pre-unibody model that had a fan full of dust.. a little surgery brought it back to life.
The laptop runs cool, it just runs slower as well. Stuff that used to be distributed pretty evenly seems to really peak the cpu meter now.
it's working very hard to do what it's doing, and the problem has been manifesting itself as performance issues while we use the machine during performance.