Last week, I learned something important about CPU monitoring. At work, I have a AMD Athlon(tm) II X3 440 Processor. This is a CPU with 3 cores. Each core can go up to 3.0 GHz, but when idle, the cores drop down to 800 MHz.
So, to monitor this process, you first have to right click the toplevel panel of Ubuntu. Choose Add to Panel... and choose CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor. The effect should be something like this:

Ok, this means one of your cores is currently running at 800 MHz. Try clicking (left) on the monitor. You will see the following settings:

First of all, you can see you can manually set the clock speed, or you can use a planning. Default is set to On demand. When the PC needs a lot of CPU resources, the clock speed will go up. Or you can choose for performance. The cores will run at 3.0 GHz anytime.
To see a specific core, right click on the monitor and choose Preferences:

As you can see, it's possible to select a certain core. I've added 3 monitors, to be able to check all my cores in one time:

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