RAW converter's computational power requirements: 4core or 8core?

Hey guys,

Has anyone experimented with image data converter's time requirements to batch process eg 1000 raw pictures?

If someone could post some benchmarks using sony's software, it would be great.

I use ubuntu 12.04 (all updates are current as of this minute) and sony's software on WINE.

It does the job but it stalls unexpectedly and so it does on windows sometimes but on linux ALWAYS, for no apparent reason (no logs with usefull info).

BIOS

vendor: American Megatrends Inc.
version: 080015
size: 64KiB
capacity: 960KiB

Motherboard

product: PI-AM3RS760G2
vendor: Sapphire Tech
slot: To Be Filled By O.E.M.

CPU

product: AMD Athlon(tm) II X4 645 Processor
vendor: Hynix Semiconductor (Hyundai Electronics)
bus info: cpu@0
version: AMD Athlon(tm) II X4 645 Processor
serial: To Be Filled By O.E.M.
slot: CPU 1
size: 2400MHz
capacity: 3100MHz
width: 64 bits
clock: 200MHz

System Memory

slot: System board or motherboard
size: 4112MiB

The average image, it takes 10secs to be processed (all cpus high) but also some time to read the file and save it, so the whole thing takes approx 14 - 20secs per picture.

Has anyone tried it on an i7 or other better/faster pc to tell me if there is a significant difference in the time it takes per picture?

I am talking about 1000's of pictures here to be converted.

And another thing,

If you are using this picture codec pack on windows, how fast does it render the thumbnails?

A screencasting video or some good data would be an enormous help!