Olympus Studio software on Mac Pro

It’s rare see a dual-cpu Mac Pro Nehalem fully utilized, but version 2.3 of Olympus Studio uses all 16 virtual cores during preview.

That’s not to say it’s fast, in fact it’s godawful slow, given that all cores are being used (using them all does not mean using them efficiently). I’m seeing ~7 seconds to preview a raw file, and another ~6 seconds to render it at actual pixels— on a dual CPU 2.93GHz Mac Pro Nehalem (see my review). It doesn’t get any faster than that in July 2009. Maybe Olympus hired some Nikon software engineers? On the MacBook Pro it takes 21 seconds to render at actual pixels— that's worse than Nikon Capture NX2 with a 24MP D3x file!

For more on CPU utilization, see CPU Cores Explained.

Strangely, using Save As a 16-bit TIF uses only a single core (single threaded), but is about the same speed. Weird.

CPU usage of Olympus Studio 2.3