[CentOS] CPU usage over estimated?

Thu Jun 4 12:37:46 UTC 2009
Theo Band <theo.band at greenpeak.com>

I have a quad core CPU running Centos5.

When I use top, I see that running processes use 245% instead of 100%.
If I use gkrellm, I just see one core being used 100%.

top:
   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES SWAP  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
18037 thba      31  15  304m 242m  62m  44m R 245.3  4.1 148:58.72 ic

Also in the log of some programs I see this strange factor:
  CPU Seconds = 2632   Wall Clock Seconds = 1090

There are all single threaded programs, so it's not that more cores are
being used.

[thba at fazant]$ uname -a
Linux fazant 2.6.18-128.1.6.el5 #1 SMP Wed Apr 1 09:10:25 EDT 2009
x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux


[thba at fazant]$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 6
model           : 26
model name      : Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU         940  @ 2.93GHz
stepping        : 4
cpu MHz         : 1600.000
cache size      : 8192 KB
physical id     : 0
siblings        : 4
core id         : 0
cpu cores       : 4
apicid          : 0
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 11
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge
mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpimmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx
rdtscp lm constant_tsc ida nonstop_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2
cx16 xtpr popcnt lahf_lm
bogomips        : 5871.54
clflush size    : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes   : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: [8]

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Theo