0.94 is the first version to reduce hardware requirements (120MB disk space from 30GB+, <2GB RAM from 8+) while increasing performance AND increasing scalability.
Seriously everyone, 0.94 is shaping up nicely. I've been flying by the seat of my pants and using 0.94 regularly since the first major chances were committed. After some initial crashes (totally understandable given the nature of software development), it worked really well for me. I don't doubt that there are bugs here and there - Carlton Banks inadvertently showed us quite a few serious bugs - and I encourage everybody to bang on the test builds when they come out. I'm just saying that, for my purposes, 0.94 is quite nice and does go a bit easier on the system.
Cutting the demand for CPU cycles by 6 or 8 as is claimed could cut the intial sync time by a similar factor.
I expect it will be that much of an improvement, OpenSSL is painfully slow at ECDSA.
I don't think it's that OpenSSL is painfully slow at ECDSA - I've found it to be okay, and probably a bit better than Crypto++ - as much as libsecp256k1 is specifically designed to optimize the hell out of working with the secp256k1 ECDSA curve (i.e., the curve Bitcoin uses). I believe Wladimir & Pieter have both reported 6-8x speed increases in verifications. They're just concerned about the possibility of a specially crafted Bitcoin transaction being validated in libsecp256k1 and not in OpenSSL or vice versa (i.e., a fork would occur). So, for now, libsecp256k1 is used only for signing, where it's apparently easier to test all the various use cases.
Anyway, yes, once the switch is thrown and libsecp256k1 is used for verification, BC Core should speed up quite a bit. The main contributors are doing some pretty cool things if you pay attention to the commits and the related conversations.