Load 9, yet no cpu eater in top

Hello,

I am puzzled by the high load of my box:

$ w
13:03:17 up 72 days, 19:18, 3 users, load average: 9.00, 9.01, 9.00
USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT
vobadm :0 - Thu14 ?xdm? 12:19m 0.22s gnome-
session
vobadm pts/1 :0.0 Thu14 1:47m 0.14s 0.03s bash
mgirod pts/3 engbuildpc.dubli 09:23 0.00s 0.04s 0.00s w
$ top -n1 | head
top - 13:11:09 up 72 days, 19:26, 3 users, load average: 9.04, 9.03,
9.00
Tasks: 168 total, 1 running, 167 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.1% us, 0.1% sy, 0.0% ni, 99.8% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi,
0.0% si
Mem: 2056752k total, 2033252k used, 23500k free, 234548k
buffers
Swap: 2031608k total, 176k used, 2031432k free, 1145920k
cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+
COMMAND
28065 mgirod 15 0 8440 1096 792 R 2 0.1 0:00.01
top
1 root 16 0 4752 556 460 S 0 0.0 0:01.63
init
2 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.26 migration/
0
$ uname -vorms
Linux 2.6.9-42.ELsmp #1 SMP Wed Jul 12 23:32:02 EDT 2006 x86_64 GNU/
Linux
$ egrep '^processor' /proc/cpuinfo | wc -l
8
$ egrep '^cpu cores' /proc/cpuinfo | sort -u
cpu cores : 2

Is it normal, Doctor?

Thanks,
Marc