I'm trying to understand the Load average in my Debian system. I've read some explanations of the displayed values and I came to understand that the number represents how "overloaded" my system is. So, the 0.5 load average means, that my system could compute twice as much without any additional latency. And load average of 2 means, that my system can handle roughly half of the load.
I've read that load average number should be divided by the number of processors in the system. So, load average of 2 on 2-CPU system is equal to load average of 1 on single-CPU system. Right?
But now comes the dilemma. How about multi-core systems? There seems to be a big dispute about this issue. Most of the older information about it indicates that number of cores is not equal to number of processors and thus the load average on 8-core system is not divided by the number of cores. There are also a lot of newer articles that say, that number of cores roughly corresponds to the number of CPUs, so the load average should be divided by number of cores.
What information is right?
I'm going to probably answer my own question with this, because I enclose screenshot of my system, that has 8 cores and only one of them is 100% utilized - and my load average is 1.02. So, this looks like that load average should be divided by the number of cores in order to get the relevant information about system load. Am I right?