The accepted answer for this question is incorrect. The second line of the output is the number of threads/processes that are launched in that grouping. Your CPU usage is 20% in the above. 5% of that is from user apps and 15% from system apps. You have 73 idle threads, 14 system threads, and 5 user threads (according to the second line).
for instance, here is a current top snapshot for my Droid.
User 6%, System 5%, IOW 0%, IRQ 0%
User 21 + Nice 0 + Sys 16 + Idle 270 + IOW 0 + IRQ 3 + SIRQ 0 = 310
PID CPU% S #THR VSS RSS PCY UID Name
30994 4% S 19 134912K 24140K bg app_24 edu.vu.isis.ammo.spotreport
1021 3% S 57 217400K 58504K fg system system_server
20911 2% R 1 880K 400K fg shell top
1053 0% S 1 0K 0K fg root tiwlan_wq
995 0% S 2 1272K 128K fg compass /system/bin/akmd2
According to the accepted answer, I would have 310% CPU usage, when this is actually just the number of threads. I am pretty sure I am actually using only 11% of the CPU, where the top 3 processes are using 9% of that total.
answered 2011-08-11T17:31:04.347