7-Zip 25.00 now supports more CPU threads, and improves compression speeds

[harlan4096]

The 7-Zip 25.00 update has been released. The open source file archiver now support CPUs with more than 64 CPU threads.

Not a lot of processors have so many threads. Some AMD's Ryzen Threadripper CPUs have 32/64 cores and 64/128 threads. Intel Xeon has a few chips that meet the criteria, but they are not usually used on PCs. Anyway, if you have a high-end CPU, you can use 7-zip to compress zip/7z/xz archives and run the 7-Zip benchmark at faster speeds, especially on Windows.

The update also improves the bzip2 compression speed by 15 to 40%. 7-zip has also improved the speed of deflate for zip/gz compression by 1-3%. The utility now offers improved support for zip, cpio and fat archives. These improvements are rather minor, but performance improvements are always welcome.

One more thing that 7-Zip's release notes mentioned was that some bugs were fixed, along with some undisclosed security issues. No further details about the bugs have been provided. I would like to point out that due to its popularity, 7-zip was previously exploited by threat actors in a Mark-of-the-Web Bypass Vulnerability attack. This zero-day threat allowed remote attackers to bypass the protection mechanism on affected installations of 7-Zip. The issue, which was tracked under CVE-2025-0411 had affected 7-zip 24.08. Security researchers at Trend Micro had discovered the vulnerability and reported it to the app's developer, Igor Pavlov, and the issue was patched as part of the version 24.09 update in November 2024.

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