faster utility for creating .zip archives

Hi all,

I'm sometimes really surprised by the stock apple software, like Quitime or iMovie or in this case the utilitiy in the finder that creates .zip archives... why on earth don't they aim for the best and quickest user experience and make use of all processors... or am I misinterpreting the info given by the activity monitor ?

the procss seems to be using I'm trying to compress 10GB worth of movies from my Canon 7D (probably no big savings anyway) and neither the CPU nor the full number of cores seems to be used. I realize this is a quadcore and the other 4 cores ar "virtual" or Hyperthreading cores... but still wouldnt it be usefull to use them all ?

btw. runing 10.7.x on a

Model Identifier: MacBookPro8,3

Processor Name: Intel Core i7

Processor Speed: 2,2 GHz

Number of Processors: 1

Total Number of Cores: 4

L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB

L3 Cache: 6 MB

Memory: 16 GB

the files in question reside on a external HD attached via FW 800

Anyway, I dont expect there is a tweak or way to make the built in utility better (before Apple decides to do things right) but could someone recommend a utility that creates .zip ( or even.tar and other formats ) and a) allows to see the expected savings beforehand and b) makes use of all the power the computer has ? I know there is plenty of utilities in the app store but of course none of them gives this kind of info...

thx for any hint