I understand that very well. But non of the standard tools that manage CPU understand that, and most people don't either.
If I had a nickel for every time I had to explain why "You are at 50% CPU now, but you can't actually run twice as many processes on this machine and get the same runtime", I'd be able to buy a large frapuccino or two at starbucks.
Perhaps I'm uninformed though - is there a tool like htop, which would give me an idea of how close am I to maxing out a CPU?