From its very first release, Opera has been designed with performance and efficiency in mind. It was built to maximise speed on the early computers, whilst working within their limited resources. These computers tended to deliver performance improvements courtesy of processor clock-speed improvements year-on-year. In recent times the computing landscape has changed, and so has Opera. Modern computing resources consist of multiple processors, each consisting of a number of cores. Significant speed-up in virtual prototyping throughput can be achieved by utilising this tremendous power at your fingertips.
The solver modules in Opera-3d are shared-memory multi-core parallel-capable. The relative performance is dependent upon many factors. Certain aspects of a solution are inherently linearly scaleable. This includes, for example, coil-field calculations. Other aspects can only be performed in a thread-safe manner when they are executed in a serial fashion.
Typical performance figures are written up in a more comprehensive case study, which can be found here.