yeah 6000x4000 isnt large its huge. problem is quadcore/ram/etc doesnt make much of a dent in these operations cause your limited to 2_4 processes... only real way to speed such up would be to use something like nvidias cuda... basically a small supercomputer in a graphics card case... problem is things need to be programmed to utilize it... the manifold gis system is the only system i've seen use it, and while i hate manifold... they have been getting some strong results (a geoprocess that takes 10 min to run took under 5 seconds in a test they did in ottawa at a conference...) seems like it may be the processing way to go... interesting none the less