7 Zip new version 2012

7z is the new archive format, providing high compression ratio.

The main features of 7z format:

Open architecture

High compression ratio
Strong AES-256 encryption
Ability of using any compression, conversion or encryption method
Supporting files with sizes up to 16000000000 GB
Unicode file names
Solid compressing
Archive headers compressing
7z has open architecture, so it can support any new compression methods. Now the following methods are integrated to 7z:

Method Description
LZMA Improved and optimized version of LZ77 algorithm
LZMA2 Improved version of LZMA
PPMD Dmitry Shkarin's PPMdH with small changes
BCJ Converter for 32-bit x86 executables
BCJ2 Converter for 32-bit x86 executables
BZip2 Standard BWT algorithm
Deflate Standard LZ77-based algorithm
LZMA is default and general compression method of 7z format. The main features of LZMA method:

High compression ratio
Variable dictionary size (up to 4 GB)
Compressing speed: about 1 MB/s on 2 GHz CPU
Decompressing speed: about 10-20 MB/s on 2 GHz CPU
Small memory requirements for decompressing (depend from dictionary size)
Small code size for decompressing: about 5 KB
Supporting multi-threading and P4's hyper-threading