Yes, pbzip divides up the file into blocks per core. Though I think some versions (older?) of bzip are unable to handle pbzip archives. I used pbzip2 on an old

Yes, pbzip divides up the file into blocks per core. Though I think some versions (older?) of bzip are unable to handle pbzip archives. I used pbzip2 on an old octo core xeon server with a decent sas raid and was able to compress at well over 200MB/sec, closer to 300MB in some cases.