Speed up ACR & Bridge for Core i7

I just upgraded to a Core i7-860 & 8GB DDR3 and am really pleased with the speed increase (came from a 2ghz Core2Duo).

I had a quick question regarding ACR & Bridge:
Is there any way to make it save multiple RAW images at once?

I typically load a couple hundred photos into ACR and when it's time to save them out, they are processed and saved, one at a time by ACR.

Watching Task Manager on Windows 7, Bridge.exe barely hits 85-90% for a few 10ths of a second, and then goes back down to the mid-teens for another second or so. This program would absolutely fly if it could crunch on one photo per processor (or even one photo per thread). It just seems by doing it one at a time, it doesn't take full advantage of newer multiprocessor systems.

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Interesting question. I'd imagine that, unfortunately, PS is not actually creating a separate process thread for each save operation. It's too bad, because that would be a nice capability.

Of course, I could be wrong....

I wonder if there's an unofficial way to make PS spawn multiple save operations simultaneously? Since ACR is dealing with separate cr2 files and their sidecars, everything from the data standpoint seems cleanly compartmentalized (thus should be much easier to implement than, for example, rendering video).

Maybe this will be a possibility when CS5 comes around.

I don't know about out of ACR -- you might try running Image processor with some PS actions, launched one at a time to see if separate threads are spawned. I've never done actual multi-thread programming for Windows, so I'm not sure of the specifics it involves (it was pretty straightforward when I was doing Unix programming).

I don't think it's possible in ACR. You could potentially try running ACR in both Bridge and Photoshop, doing half the job each.

There's a way to do it in Lightroom - something like export in 2-4 sets, and it does them in parallel. I don't use LR though so i'm not sure about that, I just read it somewhere.