Multicore support

[fmcf]

Hi All,

I searched for this topic in the archives, but only found a few very old references, so I'm here bringing it up once more.

I just got a new version of VS today, Pro X7 (and installed SP1 as well). I didn't spend enough time looking at all possible configurations, but at least at a first glance, other than using the hardware acceleration, there is no support for multicore in Windows 7 (at least).

Looking at the processor performance (I have a quad-core machine), I can see that even if I bump the priority of the VS process it gets mostly one full core, which is only 25% of my CPU power. I'm not sure how the multicore architecture works on a workstation machine vs a server machine, but I was under the impression that a single process can take only up to 1 core (although I know of examples of processes taking 7 cores on a server-class machine/OS with 12 cores, I see that everyday as part of my job involves maintenance on a datacenter).

I'm converting a large batch of MPG files into MP4 and I was wondering if I could make that process 4 times faster by somehow forcing each conversion to run in a separate core, which I thought would be possible since the advertising of VSPX7 said that there were several performance improvements and so... Not that I'm complaining, my old version was really old (X2), so I'd have to update anyways to get the latest and greatest, just a bit disappointed that there seems to have been little progress in that front (at least that's my impression).

Thanks for any insights,

Fred