Is it faster? no one has even mentioned the processing speed. Does it matter? not really. Why? because 52 seconds to 45 seconds isn't going to make a difference in anyone's life.
you couldnt be more wrong. This is just a test on 10 files. I usualy have a batch of 200-300 raw images to process (other thay I had 1000 images from cousin's wedding), and it IS important is it going to be processed in 1 hour, or in 30 minutes.
I was expecting better performance, because they were announcing that new CS4 can use GPU for processing images, with CPU, for better performance. From this test, I dont think it uses my GPU. Maybe my graphic card is old and useless for PS. lol. Or it uses GPU for some other operations...
I will play with it in next few weeks so I will know the difference better.
Okay then, lets do the math.
Assuming you want it to take 10 seconds less to process 10 files, that means 42 seconds instead of 52. That means 1 second per file, which means 300 seconds per 300 images.
On a set of 300 images, you save 5 minutes. It also means 4.2 seconds of total processing per file, which is nothing. Anything more is just trying to ask for miracles, unless of course you want the process to be done for you in camera.
In my opinion, (and I've changed my workflow) the more efficient way to streamline is to cut out manual tasks through actions in Lightroom and Photoshop and do less manually - or at least have the computer automate most of it. You can then pump out more final versions of files than having to worry abuot raw processing times. Allocating resources properly is more than half the battle in cutting down production times