And what benefit do you think 4 CPU cores will give you ?
Remember the AMLogic SoC - System on a Chip has a number of co-processors packed into it. The CPU's generally do very little during user interface use or video playback.
What has likely occurred is Xiaomi are now using the Interactive CPU governor instead of HotPlug - which is not need on mains powered media player. HotPlug shuts down CPU cores when not needed to save battery power on cell/mobile phones.
Kodi was always able to use all four cores, but the info screen wasn't always "reporting" the correct stats.
As title says, Kodi finally shows 4 cores. The downside though is it shows CPU usage at 0.0%, at least in Leia Alpha 2.
For me with same kodi 0/percent
CPU Load can't be determined in Oreo. You can only get the CPU frequency. Based on the frequency, you can assume the load.
I didn't think to check that info screen on mine, but the wife mentioned that Kodi was significantly more responsive after "whatever I did to the box". Scrolling through media and moving through menus sounds like it sped up, not sure if that's just a placebo, but I didn't factory reset or anything.
Well good news is that video playback seams to be improved with less buffering on some files that were giving me trouble before the update.
The bad news is that Oreo broke external hard drive support so it means little and now I need to use plex through my PC which is less convenient then using kodi
The gpu is used for video unless you're running in software decoding or using an incompatible codec
So was it a "cosmetic" issue before, or did it actually miss functionality/performance because of this before?